Book revew: The Corrections

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

I have the feeling that if I loved novels, I would have loved this book. I really liked it though.

Here are some of my favorite parts, insights into:

Depression: "A lack of desire to spend money becomes a symptom of disease that requires expensive medication. Which medication then destroys the libido, in other words destroys the appetite for the one pleasure in life that's free, which means the person has to spend even more money on compensatory pleasures. The very definition of mental 'health' is the ability to participate in the consumer economy. When you buy into therapy, you're losing the battle with a commercialized, medicalized, totalitarian modernity right this instant."

The stupidity and rapacity of the investor class, that is, the world's ruling class: "Gitanas had created a satiric Web page offering DEMOCRACY FOR PROFIT: BUY A PIECE OF EUROPEAN HISTORY... Visitors to the site were invited to send cash to the erstwhile VIPPPAKJRIINPB17 - 'one of Lithuania's most venerable political parties,' the 'cornerstone' of the country's governing coalition for 'three of the last seven years,' the leading vote-getter in the April 1993 general election, and now a 'Western-leaning pro-business party' reorganized as the 'Free Market Party Company.' Gitanas's Web site promised that, as soon as the Free Market Party Company had bought enough votes to win a national election, its foreign investors would not only become 'equity shareholders' in Lithuania Incorporated (a 'for-profit nation state') but would also be rewarded, in proportion to the size of their investment, with personalized memorials to their 'heroic contribution' to the 'market liberation' of the country. By sending just $100, for example, an American investor could have a street in Vilnius ('no less than two hundred meters in length') named after him; for $5,000 the Free Market Party Company would hang a portrait of the investor ('minimum size 60 cm x 80 cm; includes ornate gilt frame') in the Gallery of National Heroes at the historic Slapeliai House; for $25,000 the investor would be awarded perpetual title to an eponymous town 'of no fewer than 5,000 souls' and be granted a 'modern, hygienic form of droit du seigneur' that met 'most of' the guidelines established by the Third International Conference on Human Rights."

Rationalizations: "She reasoned that if the problem in the dining room was her responsibility then she was horrendously derelict in not resolving it, and a loving mother could never be so derelict, and she was a loving mother, so the responsibility must not have been hers.

The travails of seduction: "For the next two hours D mainly paid attention to her hand, which she'd laid on the sofa cushion within easy reach of R's. The hand wasn't comfortable there, it wanted to be retracted, but she didn't want to give up hard-won territory."

Book review: Sex Matters

Sex Matters by Osho

Interesting collection of speeches or essays themed around Osho's interpretation of the meaning of sex, and how most human societies and religions have twisted and mutilated it to our detriment.

"It is sexual energy that transforms into love. But everyone is against it, is inimical to it. Your so-called good people are against it. And this opposition has not allowed the seed even to sprout. It has destroyed the palace of love at its foundation, on the very first step. The coal never becomes a diamond because the acceptance that is needed for its evolution, for its process of transformation, is out of the question."

Put in another way - and there is a lot of repetition in this book - "[a]ll life, all expression, all flowering is basically sex energy. And it is against this sex energy that religions and cultures are pouring poison into the minds of human beings. They are trying to engage human beings in a fight against it. They have entangled people in this battle against their own basic energy, so they have become wretched, pathetic, devoid of love, false, nobodies."

But the danger of the suppression of sex is not, in Osho's view, limited to the disastrous consequence of the suppression and inhibition of love. The suppression of sex also means the promotion of violence, an inverse relationship that has also been noted by anthropologists studying cultures with different attitudes towards sex and violence. "Restrained people are very dangerous because a live volcano boils inside them, and only outwardly are they rigid and full of control. Please remember, anything that is controlled requires so much effort and energy that the restraint cannot be maintained the whole time. You will have to relax sometime; you will have to rest sometime. ... If it needs effort, it will also need rest. And so, the more self-controlled a saint is, the more dangerous he is - because the need to relax this restraint will come. In twenty-four hours of self-control, one will have to relax for an hour or two, and during this period there will be such an upsurge of suppressed 'sins' that he will find himself in the midst of hell."

"This is the reason the animal in us erupts at the slightest opportunity. At the time of the India and Pakistan partition, we saw how the animal lurks beneath the clothing of human beings. We came to know what the people who pray in the mosques and recite the Gita in the temples are capable of. They can loot, they can slaughter, they can rape, they can do anything. The very people who were always seen praying in the temples and mosques were now seen raping in the streets. What happened to them? ...Our life energy has only one natural but animal outlet, and that outlet is sex. Closing that channel creates problems."

But what is most important to Osho about sex is that it is the first experience humans ever had with meditation - itself the key to a peaceful, content life. "[M]an had his first glimpses of awakening, of meditation, in moments of lovemaking - nowhere else. It was only in moments of lovemaking that human beings realized for the first time that so much bliss is possible. Those who meditated on this truth, those who reflected deeply on the phenomenon of sex, of lovemaking, saw that in moments of lovemaking, at the climax, the mind becomes empty of thoughts. For a moment all thoughts disappear. And this emptiness of the mind, this disappearance of thoughts, brings a showering of blessings. They discovered the secret."

In Chan/Son/Thien/Zen Buddhism, the goal is a state of meditation-induced "no-mind", where the mind's chatter is quiet and one experiences experience without distraction. Osho's point is that during orgasm too, all the mind's chatter disappears and one experiences no-mind - only without the trouble of sitting uncomfortably for hours on end.

Sex brings with it the two most important features of religious experience: egolessness and timelessness. "[I]n the moment of orgasm the ego vanishes and egolessness emerges. For a moment there is no ego; for a moment, no trace even of 'I am.' ... In the experience of enlightenment, there is no time at all. It is beyond time. There is no past, no future; there is only the present. This is the second thing that happens in the experience of sex - there is no past, no future; time also vanishes for a moment."

With such an easy, simple and immensely pleasurable means of attaining religious enlightenment at hand, it is clear to see why religions would be violently jealous. After all, it is they that are supposed to hold the key to enlightenment; their rites that offer transcendence; their donation boxes through which paradise is to be achieved. Therefore, it is unsurprising that religions tend to be anti-sex, trapping its so-called "proper" exercise within the cage of marriage; in a species for whom polygamy, not monogamy, is natural (or so all evidence points to).

"Religions are against sex because down the centuries they have come to know that sex is the most enjoyable thing for man, so they poison his joy. Once you poison his joy and you put this idea in his mind that something is wrong in sex - it is sin - then he will never be able to enjoy it, and if he cannot enjoy it, then his energies will start moving in other directions. He will become more ambitious. ... Ambition is sex energy diverted, and the society diverts you. You ask, 'Why are all the religions against sex?' They are against sex because that is the only way to make you unhappy, guilty, afraid. Once you are afraid, you can be manipulated. Remember this fundamental rule: Make a person afraid if you want to dominate him." This is a not an unfamiliar lesson to Unitedstatesians during the "War on Terror," Germans and Japanese during World War II, Chileans during Pinochet's rule, etc., etc.

The way that religions have forced sexuality into the domain of morality - which every culture in the world has recognized to be exhausted by the principle of "treat others as you would like them to treat you" - has been a tremendous tragedy. "[T]he very combination of sex and morality has poisoned the whole past of morality. Morality became so much sex-oriented that it lost all other dimensions, which are far more important. Sex should not really be so much of a concern for moral thinking. ... But sex and morality became almost synonymous in the past; sex became overpowering, overwhelming. So whenever you say somebody is immoral you simply mean that something is wrong with his sexual life. And when you say somebody is a very moral person, all that you mean is that he follows the rules of sexuality laid down by the society in which he lives. Morality became one-dimensional; it has not been good. ... [Sexuality] should not be a concern of the society at all. Unless somebody interferes in somebody else's life - imposes himself, forces somebody, is violent, violates somebody's life, then only should society come in. Otherwise there is no problem; it should not be any concern at all."

The imposition of a regime of monogamy has been poisonous to humanity because "[w]e have created a monogamous mind, not loving. That's why there are so many wars, so much cruelty, so much violence, in many, many names - religion, politics, ideology. Any nonsense will do as long as you find something to be violent about. And then see how people become sharp: their eyes look brilliant when there is war, when everyone is just freed from the taboo against killing. Then you can kill anybody. So you feel more joy when you kill somebody - you never feel joy when you love someone. ... Why? Our capacity to love has atrophied. A child is capable of loving anyone. A child is born to love the whole world, a child is born to love everything, a child is born to love the whole universe... if a person loves many people, then there is no reason to marry someone only because of love, because he can love many people without marriage, so there is no reason. We have forced everyone to go into marriage because of love. Because you cannot love outside it, so we have unnecessarily forced love and marriage to be together. Marriage is for deeper things - for intimacy, for a communion, to do something that cannot be done alone, that can be done together, that needs a togetherness, a deep togetherness."

"Sex has nothing to do with jealousy, anger, and possessiveness. But man's mind has been conditioned in such a way by the vested interests that they have exploited the very source of his life energy - sex - to fulfill their own interests. For example, man is naturally polygamous, and by man I don't mean only men but women too. Human beings are polygamous, but all the societies have forced monogamy. Now that creates the trouble. ... If society were run by intelligent people - not by people who want to exploit you, but by people who want to fulfill your nature to its uttermost capacity - there would be no jealousy. The wife would understand that once in a while the husband needs some other woman, 'just the way I need some other man.' ... What is wrong if you play tennis with one partner today, another partner another day? Is there any jealousy? There is no question of jealousy. And it is nothing more than tennis - two energies meeting and merging. And after the pill, the basic argument of all the religions is completely outdated."

"When there is no jealousy there is no anger, and all the qualities that I speak of will come automatically. A woman who gives you freedom, a man who never tries to possess you - you are allowed to move in the world according to your own wishes - do you think friendship will not arise between these two persons? A man giving freedom to the wife, a wife giving freedom tot he husband - there is bound to be great friendship, great intimacy. ... But the societies of the past never wanted this to happen. They wanted people to remain bored: tie one woman to one man forever, and you have started a pilgrimage to the ultimate boredom. These bored people, suffering, cannot revolt. ... [T]he vested interests don't want you to be intelligent, to be rich in experience, to reach to the climax of your potential, because that is dangerous to them. You can remain slaves only if you are poor in experience in intelligence. You can remain slaves only if you are a henpecked husband. ... And you have been kept poor psychologically, spiritually, physically, so that a few people can become presidents, prime ministers, kings and queens, a few people can become popes, or Ayatollah Khomeini. Just for a few people the whole of humanity is sacrificed!"

As comedian Bill Hicks observed about a society in which all are raised to love each other, sexually if desired, sans distinctions and separations and without regard to people having what amount to sexual property interests in each other: "Now if that's not a danger to society! I mean, how are we gonna keep building nuclear weapons, you know what I mean? What's gonna happen to the arms industry once we realize that we're all one? It's gonna fuck up the economy!" Osho makes much the same point: "If society is allowed total freedom about joy, nobody will be destructive. People who can love beautifully are never destructive. And people who can love beautifully and have the joy of life will not be competitive either. These are the problems. ... Now this whole society depends on one thing, and that is sex repression. Otherwise the economy will be destroyed, sabotaged. War will disappear and with it the whole war machinery; politics will become meaningless and the politician will no longer be important. Money will not have value if people are allowed to love. Because they are not allowed to love, money becomes the substitute, money becomes their love. So there is a subtle strategy. Sex has to be repressed, otherwise this whole structure of the society will fall immediately."

And what a loss that would be!

Book review: Why I Am Not a Hindu

"Why I Am Not a Hindu" by Kancha Ilaiah

"Hinduism has never been a humane philosophy. It is the most brutal religious school that the history of religions has witnessed. The Dalitbahujan castes of India are the living evidence of its brutality."

The author, Kancha Ilaiah, is a "Dalitbahujan", a group which includes India's lower castes like farmers and the "untouchables". Ilaiah (sounds like "Isaiah") refuses to lump Dalitbahujans in with Hindus: "What do we, the lower [castes, or Dalitbahujans], have to do with Hinduism ...? [The Dalitbahujans of India] have never heard the word 'Hindu' - not as a word, nor as the name of a culture, nor as the name of a religion in our early childhood days. We heard about the Turukoollu (Muslims), we heard about Kirastaanapoollu (Christians), we heard about Baapanoollu (Brahmins) [the priestly caste] and Koomatoollu (Baniyas) [the merchant class] spoken of as people who were different from us. Among these four categories, the most different were the [Brahmins and the Baniyas]. There are at least some aspects of life common to us and the [Muslims and Christians]. We all eat meat, we all touch each other. With the [Muslims], we shared several other cultural relations. We both celebrated the Peerila festival. Many [Muslims] came with us to the fields. The only people with whom we had no relations, whatsoever, were the [Brahmins and Baniyas]. But today we are suddenly being told that we have a common religious and cultural relationship with the [Brahmins and Baniyas]. This is not merely surprising; it is shocking."

So begins Ilaiah's broadside against Hinduism and "Hindutva" or Hindu-ness, the ideology of the Hindu right. In the book, he argues that Hinduism, with its focus on upper caste gods, values, and culture, is a patriarchal and fascist religion and worldview. Furthermore, Hinduism should be considered the sole preserve of the upper castes - despite efforts by the Hindu right to draw the Dalitbahujan masses into the Hindu fold (in a subservient position of course) to increase their numbers and gain unity and strength in the fight against Muslims and Christians. Ilaiah identifies the Hindus as the ancestors of the Aryan tribes who were supposed to have invaded the subcontinent from the north a few thousand years ago, and the Dalitbahujans as the ancestors of the indigenous peoples of the subcontinent prior to the Aryan invasion. (He even attempts to explain Hindu sexism by proffering literary evidence tending to show how "all women, including Brahmin women, were treated in the same demeaning way because they were seen to share the same genealogical origins... because most of the ancient Aryan invaders were men and they must have married the native Sudra-Dravid women. They must have had sex with such women and must have treated them as the equivalent to Sudra slaves.")

Ilaiah explains that India today is in the sad state it is in owing to Hinduism and Hindus - meaning, again, the upper castes - which are still the ruling elites in India. During British occupation upper caste Indians were made into a comprador class: a segment of an occupied society that receives benefits and rewards from the occupier in return for collaboration. By the time India gained independence from Britain, "an all-India 'upper' caste elite - the new bhadralok (the 'upper' caste combine) - was ready to take over the whole range of post-colonial political institutions... each institution was made the preserve of the 'upper' caste forces, with Brahmins being in the lead in many of [them]." Even the anti-colonial, nationalist movements were hegemonized by the Brahmins and their upper caste allies, a process which was made possible "because the British colonialists themselves saw a possibility of manipulation of institutions, parties and organizations if they remained in the hands of the so-called upper castes... Consciously or unconsciously, the British themselves helped to construct a 'brahminical meritocracy' that came to power in post-Independence India."

"In post-colonial India, in the name of Congress [Party] democratic rule, the Hindus came to power both at Delhi and at the provincial headquarters. Parliamentary democracy in essence became brahminical democracy. Within no time the colonial bureaucracy was transformed into a brahminical bureaucracy. The same brahminical forces transformed themselves to suit an emerging global capitalism. They recast their Sanskritized life-style to anglicized life-styles, reshaping themselves, to live a semi-capitalist (and at the same time brahminical) life. Their anglicization did not undermine their casteized authoritarianism. All apex power centres in the country were brahminized and the power of the bureaucracy greatly extended. Because of their anglicization quite a few of them were integrated into the global techno-economic market. Such top brahminical elites were basically unconcerned with the development of the rural economy because it would result in changing the conditions of the Dalitbahujan masses and thus new social forces might emerge. Thus the anglicized brahminical class also became an anti-development social force."

Even the Indian Communist Party did not escape upper caste domination. "Notionally the Communist leadership was trying to portray itself as an integral part of the masses and to stress that it was no different from the people. But in reality the Dalitbahujan masses remained distinctly different in three ways: (i) the Communist leadership came from the 'upper' caste - mainly from Brahmins; (ii) they remained Hindu in day-to-day life-styles; and (iii) by and large the masses were economically poor but the leaders came from relatively wealthy backgrounds. The masses came from Dalitbahujan castes, and these castes never found an equal place in the leadership structures. Even in states like Andrhra Pradesh and Kerala, where non-Brahmin movements were strong enough to influence the society, the pattern held good... All over the country, the Brahmin population has become leaders in all spheres of socio-political life. They never remained part of the masses. Thus even the Communist movement started functioning in two separate camps - the 'upper' caste leader camp and the Dalitbahujan cadre camp."

"What Hinduism has done is that through manipulative hierarchization, even in the socialist era, it has retained its hegemony over the managerial posts in the urban centres. In every industry the working masses are Dalitbahujans whose notions of life and work are non-Hinduistic [that is, they value labor and practical knowledge over leisure and religious knowledge], whereas, the entrepreneurs and managers of the factories - the directors, supervisors, engineers - are Brahmin, Baniya or Neo-Kshatriya [the warrior caste]. As a result, there is a total cultural divide between the managerial class and the working class. If some factory workers starve or if workers get injured or die because of an accident, the managers do not feel for them because there is no social relationship between them. They are separated not only by class but also by caste. Thus the worker's suffering or death is seen as that of the Other." Hence India's putrid wealth divide: divisions were first cut into society by caste, and now have been cemented by class.

...

As an interesting aside, Ilaiah argues that the "persistent theory that human beings are by nature, selfish or iniquitous or the scope for selfishness is removed only when inequality is reduced (as was done in some of the former socialist systems) and its obverse: the theory that human systems do not survive if inequalities are totally removed, both these theories can be disproved by any systematic study of Dalitwaadas [Dalitbahujan communities], where there is no negative cut-throat competition and no withdrawing into lethargy."

Book review: The Rise of China and the Demise of the World Capitalist Economy

I had hoped this would be a hopeful book somehow laying out a convincing argument that China's rise will eclipse the disintegrating international capitalist economy and usher in a new world order focused on meeting human needs in an environmentally sustainable manner. Sadly, that is not this book's argument.

...

"Chinese socialism was the historical product of a great revolution, which was based on the broad mobilization and support of the workers and peasants comprising the great majority of the population. As a result, it would necessarily reflect the interests and aspirations of ordinary working people. On the other hand, China remained a part of the capitalist world-economy, and was under constant and instance pressure of military and economic competition against other big powers. To mobilize resources for capital accumulation, surplus product had to be extracted from the workers and peasants and concentrated in the hands of the state. This in turn created opportunities for the bureaucratic and technocratic elites to make use of their control over the surplus product to advance their individual power and interests rather than the collective interest of the working people. This was the basic historical contradiction that confronted Chinese socialism as well as other socialist states in the twentieth century."

The author, Minqi Li, was a member of the student dissident movement of the 80s in China. He describes the milieu during which he studied neoclassical economics at Beijing University: "The 1980s was a decade of political and intellectual excitement in China. Despite some half-hearted official restrictions, large sections of the Chinese intelligentsia were politically active and were able to push for successive waves of the so-called 'emancipation of ideas' (jiefang sixiang). The intellectual critique of the already existing Chinese socialism at first took place largely within a Marxist discourse. Dissident intellectuals called for more democracy without questioning the legitimacy of the Chinese Revolution or the economic institutions of socialism.

After 1985, however, economic reform moved increasingly in the direction of the free market. Corruption increased and many among the bureaucratic elites became the earliest big capitalists. Meanwhile, among the intellectuals, there was a sharp turn to the right... The politically active intellectuals no longer borrowed discourse from Marxism. Instead, western classical liberalism and neoliberal economics, as represented by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, had become the new, fashionable ideology."

A turn towards neoliberalism had, by the 1980s, been made possible by decades of Maoist development policy, which had developed "the necessary industrial and technological infrastructure [allowing China to] become a major player in the global capitalist economy." Li does a good job explaining the capitalist world-system, according to Immanuel Wallerstein's formulation, with its separation into core, semi-peripheral and peripheral states. The international division of labor has core states, like the U.S. and Japan, performing cutting-edge production requiring massive investment and organization, and which offer the greatest profit margins; the semi-peripheral states, like South Korea and most recently China, performing second-generation production that was cutting edge decades ago but which still offer substantial profits; and the peripheral states, like Angola and Bangladesh, which perform low value-added production like raw material exports and low-tech manufacturing.

Li argues that China's move from peripheral to semi-peripheral status (as China now produces all sorts of high- and low-tech products for the core states) signals trouble for the capitalist world-system: "the current 'rise of China' as well as the 'rise of India,' could be the signal that the capitalist world-economy is calling upon its last strategic reserves (such as China, India, the remaining resources, and the remaining space for pollution) to make one more attempt to jump-start global accumulation... The current global development is likely to suggest that several secular trends, which result from the inherent laws of motion of the existing world-system, are now reaching their historical limits."

Why? Because the capitalist world-system relies on strategic reserves of labor that can be called upon when existing labor forces begin to successfully fight for higher wages. Since the system needs high profit margins to reproduce itself via investment, and since high wages put pressure on profit margins, the capitalist world-system needs countries like China and India to turn to for their cheap labor forces once wage costs, or lack of effective demand (in other words, low wages that reduce a market's buying power) begin to threaten profitability. But the very process of exploiting labor in China - building factories and creating an urban working class, moving China from peripheral to semi-peripheral status - threatens to undermine the ability to exploit such labor in the future. Li explains: "To the extent that the non-core states have lower levels of proletarianization, workers tend to be less educated, less effectively organized, and under constant pressure to compete against a large rural reserve army [of laborers]. The workers in these states, therefore, tend to have much lower bargaining power and receive significantly lower real wages. The low real wages in the periphery and semi-periphery make it possible for the world surplus value to be concentrated in the core and help to keep down system-wide wage costs. However, in the long run, the development of the capitalist world-economy has been associated with the progressive urbanization of the labor force. After some initial disorientation, urbanized workers have invariably struggled for higher degrees of organization and extension of their economic, social and political rights. Their struggles have led to growing degrees of proletarianization within the capitalist world economy." (emphasis added)

This spells trouble for the world-system, since as production costs increase in China as workers successfully fight for higher wages, there will be few alternative states for producers to turn to for cheap, educated labor and efficient infrastructure. Also, China's ever-increasing contribution to environmental degradation threatens to undermine the world economy through destruction of the natural environment of which it is a part.

Li's analysis of economic - and, more depressingly, ecological trends - leads to the following conclusion: "With the decline of the US hegemony (reflected by its ever-declining ability and willingness to pursue the system's long-term, common interest), no other state is in a position to replace the US and provide effective leadership for the system. China and every other potential hegemonic candidate all suffer from insurmountable contradictions and weaknesses. None has the ability to offer 'system-level solutions' to 'system-level problems.' Either the existing world-system has exhausted its historical space for potential new leadership and therefore is doomed to systemic disintegration, or the new leadership will have to assume the form of an alliance of multiple continent-sized states, which will then become a world-government and therefore bring the existing world-system to an end.

The capitalist world-economy rests upon the ceaseless expansion of material production and consumption, which is fundamentally incompatible with the requirements of ecological sustainability. Depletion of material resources and pollution of the earth's ecological system have now risen to the point that the ecological system is on the verge of collapse and the future survival of humanity and human civilization is at stake.

To summarize, multiple economic, social, geopolitical, and ecological forces are now converging towards the final demise of the existing world-system, that is, the capitalist world economy."

What comes next could be a rational world-system of production geared towards first fulfilling human needs, then wants, in an ecologically-sustainable manner. But while the current system's demise is assured, there is no guarantee of the character of its replacement, and, at this point, very little likelihood it will resemble the description above.

Impaled on the fork in the road

"Is It Time to Bail Out of America?" by Paul Craig Roberts

It can be a thrill to agree with someone you consider to be on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum. I would guess that finding a point of common agreement with the intellectual "other" stimulates the human brain to produce endorphins - and if you step outside our species for a second, the event might look just like two chimps from feuding troops beginning to bond over a shared banana. Look at what seeking this kind of thrill pushed Christoper Hitchens to become.

I got such a thrill when I agreed with Paul Craig Roberts - the so-called "Father of Reaganomics", former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan and former Wall Street Journal editor and columnist - from the moment I read the rhetorical question that is the title of his article. His analysis:

"On January 28 Obama announced his $825 billion bailout plan. This comes on top of President Bush’s $700 billion bailout of just a few months ago.

Obama says his plan will be more transparent than Bush’s and will do more good for the economy.

As large as the bailouts are--a total of $1.5 trillion in four months--the amount is small in relation to the reported size of troubled assets that are in the tens of trillions of dollars. How do we know that by June there won’t be another bailout, say $950 billion?

Where will the money come from?

Obama’s bailout plan, added to the FY 2009 budget deficit he has inherited from Bush, opens a gaping expenditure hole of about $3 trillion.

Who is going to purchase $3 trillion of US Treasury bonds?

Not the US consumer. The consumer is out of work and out of money. Private sector credit market debt is 174% of GDP. The personal savings rate is 2 percent. Ten percent of households are in foreclosure or arrears. Household debt-service ratio is at an all-time high. Household net worth has declined at a record rate. Housing inventories are at record highs.

Not America’s foreign creditors. At best, the Chinese, Japanese, and Saudis can recycle their trade surpluses with the US into Treasury bonds, but the combined surplus does not approach the size of the US budget deficit.

Perhaps another drop in the stock market will drive Americans’ remaining wealth into 'safe' US Treasury bonds.

If not, there’s only the printing press.

The printing press would turn a deflationary depression into an inflationary depression.
Unemployment combined with rising prices would be a killer.

Inflation would kill the dollar as well, leaving the US unable to pay for its imports.

All the Obama regime sees is a 'credit problem.' But the crisis goes far beyond banks’ bad investments. The United States is busted. Many of the state governments are busted. Homeowners are busted. Consumers are busted. Jobs are busted. Companies are busted.

And Obama thinks he has the money to fight wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan."

Damn skippy, Paul. Except that I'm not so sure about your prediction that a debilitating bout of inflation will inevitably ensue. On that point, I agree more with this cartoonist:

If we are facing the most serious economic catastrophe since the Great Depression, as Barack Obama has repeatedly stated (the significance of which is that this idea can safely be considered "centrist" within Unitedstatesian political thought), then why not look to what got the U.S. out of the Great Depression. As you can see from the graph that ran in today's Wall Street Journal, under Obama's stimulus plan the deficit would increase to all of ten percent of U.S. GDP. World War II spending, which got the U.S. out of the Great Depression, represented at its peak 30% of U.S. GDP:
Granted, these recent figures are the product of modern Unitedstatesian accounting, and the measurement "Gross Domestic Product" itself is not and never was intended to be a clear reflection of an economy's health. The creator of the GDP measurement wrote in the report that introduced it, "The welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined above." But regardless of the problems inherent in the accounting and form of measurement on display above, the U.S. experience with the Great Depression does prove the assertion that vast government spending and highly progressive taxation can return prosperity to an economically devastated society.

Chinese economist Minqi Li succinctly summed up the U.S. experience with and overcoming of the Great Depression as follows: "The short-lived 'irrational exuberance' of the 1920s was followed by the collapse of the 1930s. It was the surge of government spending and nationwide planning during World War Two that pulled the US economy out of the Great Depression. After the war, a greatly enlarged government sector and the active employment of Keynesian macroeconomic policies helped to stabilize the profit at relatively high levels."

This is quite similar to the conservative Unitedstatesian historian Alfred Chandler, who wrote that after the U.S. entered the war, "[t]he government spent far more than the most enthusiastic New Dealer had ever proposed. Most of the output of expenditures was destroyed or left on the battlefields of Europe and Asia, but the resulting increased demand sent the nation into a period of prosperity the like of which had never before been seen. Moreover, the supplying of huge armies and navies fighting the most massive war of all time, required a total control of the national economy. This effort brought corporate managers to Washington to carry out of the most complex pieces of economic planning in history. That experience lessened the ideological fears over the government’s role in stabilizing the economy [in the post-war economy].”

Unitedstatesian conservatives - even smart conservatives like Paul Craig Roberts - are largely ignorant of the historical examples of massive and successful economic performance turned out under socialist governance. (Dead conservative William F. Buckley Jr. was less ignorant of the successes of socialist economic policies, leading him in the 1950s to call for the U.S. to adopt features of Soviet economic policies in order to outperform, and eventually destroy, the Soviet enemy.) During and after World War II, the U.S. was enormously successful in applying socialist policies like central planning, progressive taxation and massive government spending; the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea also experienced excellent, if initial, results with socialist policies.

...

But even if the U.S. were to somehow shed its heavy entrenched ideological aversion to socialist policies, there is a wild card in play. The wild card is the outside world. Back during World War II, the U.S. was a creditor nation to whom its World War I allies were massively indebted. Perhaps those foreign loans formed the financial dyke that held back the pressure of inflation and massive currency devaluation when the U.S. began its massive socialist program to arm for the war.

Because today, if the U.S. were to embark on a policy of massive government spending to boost the economy out of recession, as Roberts correctly points out, the U.S.'s creditors might be tempted to pull their line of credit (which exists in the form of their purchases of U.S. Treasury securities with the dollars left over from their trade surpluses). With the U.S.'s foreign rug of credit pulled out from under it, the dollar's value would collapse - absent a nearly unimaginable reduction of the U.S.'s enormous trade deficit with the outside world. Imported goods would become vastly more expensive.

The U.S. could try implementing a highly interventionist/socialist policy of commanding production for the domestic market (to replace imports that would become too expensive as a result of dollar depreciation). But raw materials from foreign countries would become very expensive to buy with a debased dollar, so production would be made dear. Besides, entire factories would have to be built to replace the ones that have long since taken flight to the proximity of highly exploitable foreign laborers.

And by then the whole world would have already fallen apart. The economies of many countries are largely structured to produce things to sell in the world's largest national market, the U.S., for dollars, with which (and only with which) they can buy all sorts of commodities from oil to copper. China, for instance, sells around 20% of its exports in the U.S. only, and with the dollars it receives it buys, among other things, oil and U.S. debt. The dollars oil-producing states receive are used to purchase, among other things, various commodities (like sugar and wheat) and U.S. debt. The dollars these various commodity-producing states receive are used to purchase oil, commodities, and U.S. debt.

Noticing some repetition here? The cornerstone of the system is U.S. debt: once foreign countries stop buying, the dollar collapses, and will no longer be used as the currency in which oil, manufactured good and commodities are denominated.

Thankfully for the U.S., the rest of the world, particularly the semi-peripheral states like Brazil, Russia, India and China, "have no balls" in the eloquent Unitedstatesian turn of phrase. Their respective leaderships are doing a lot of barking at the moment, but there is little indication of any impending bite.

There are major distinctions to be made between yesterday's colonies and today's "developing nations". But to borrow from legal discourse, these are distinctions without much of a difference. The essential similarity between both is that work is done and things are produced in the colonies/developing nations; those things are sold in the imperialist/developed nations; and the lion's share of the profits from the production and selling of these things are "earned by" - more neutrally, "accrue to", or more accurately, "are expropriated by" - the imperialist/developed nations. There are many distinctions to be made between India under British imperialism and sovereign India within the contemporary international economic system, but these distinctions do not create a difference of any transcendent importance.

A 2002 study by China's State Economic and Trade Commission revealed that in the production of one representative manufactured good, profits were split 63/37 between the U.S. and Chinese companies - China being the country in which the item was entirely manufactured. 27% of China's profit was raked in by a Hong Kong-based trading company - a comprador.

The BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries are ruled by what amounts to a comprador class. (Remember, there are distinctions between colonial history and contemporary capitalism - but they are distinctions without a difference.) A comprador class is the indigenous segment of a colonized society that profits from their society's colonization. Take the Irish, under British colonization. (The Irish are white and have an affable, familiar culture to match their accents, so Unitedstatesian humans can easily identify with them.) During the Irish famine of the 1940s, while 20-25% of the Irish population was dying of starvation and malnutrition, the Irish comprador class sold direly needed food to the British. And they profited from their sales, although not as much as their British counterparts undoubtedly were.

So long as China's rulers are most greatly influenced by the Chinese comprador class - the capitalists who own or are joint partners with foreign companies in the country's export industries - China will be unlikely to rock the boat. The boat, in this context, being the international economic system, and the roles China and the U.S. currently play in it.

But China may not have to rock the boat. There may be a tsunami.

The misuse of Max Boot

Das Boot: The Unsinkable Career Of America’s Leading Twerpo-Imperialist by Mark Ames

I was so very happy to see this thorough trashing of Max Boot, a man whose name I first heard within an article bemoaning Obama's conservative Cabinet picks. Boot, the article explained, had written a short "think" piece explaining how he was "gobsmacked" by Obama's picks, who just as easily could have been made by a McCain administration. Towards the end of the piece, Boot gave a stunning illustration of ignorance: to him, the political liberal Hillary Clinton is a "neo-liberal", and "'neo-liberalism' [...] is not so different in many respects from 'neo-conservativism.'"

This being the sole instance of Boot's writing I had been subjected to until that point, I imagined the man to be a writer sharing the intellectual caliber and institutional credentials of a Rush Limbaugh or the unattractive tall blonde woman on Fox News. The evidence was clear: Boot clearly did not know what neoliberalism - certainly the most influential intellectual trend of the past half century - is. Yet he felt qualified to write about it as if he did know; clearly, I thought, Max Boot is the name of a second-rate bullshitter and perhaps an aspiring New York Post columnist.

Turns out, Boot is a "senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, columnist at the Los Angeles Times, contributing editor at Weekly Standard, regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, and former top adviser to John McCain’s campaign."

Now, the average person who is not interested in flimsy rationalizations of worldwide exploitation and mass-murder-by-economics (one million killed in the Soviet Union alone, by the application of just one precept of the theory!) has good reason to know nothing about neoliberalism. But an intellectual - or "intellectual" - who receives paychecks from the New York Times, a Republican presidential campaign, the Wall Street Journal, Council on Foreign Relations, etc., either knows what neoliberalism is, or is a peerless (one would hope) ass.

Neoliberalism is not a political but an economic ideology. It is not a branch from the tree of Unitedstatesian political liberalism, but a branch from the tree of economic liberalism: the theory that economies work best when liberated from government control. Economic liberalism was definitively destroyed by the Great Depression, the cause of which economic liberals were entirely unable to explain; nor could they formulate a cure. Economic liberalism laid in a grave for nearly a half-century before stagflation provided the crisis that destroyed its successor: the Keynesian version of capitalism (which had embraced one form of government control of the economy). During the 1970s and '80s, liberalism climbed out of its grave in its new form: neoliberalism. Neoliberalism was a zombie variant of economic liberalism, which terrorized the world's people by immiserating and exploiting the vast majority of the world's population, while showering kingly wealth upon a vanishingly small minority. The only countries to escape the ravages of the neoliberal zombie were those, like China, that retained a significant role in their economies for government control.

Neoconservatives are neoliberal in economic outlook: part of the freedom agenda they so love includes the (neoliberal) freedom of the economically powerful to do whatever they like with their power. Which is ironic in itself, because the other part of neoconservatives' freedom agenda is the freedom of citizens to share equal power in government through democratic voting.

But the most ironic - hypocritical actually - aspect of Max Boot's thought, such as it is, is that he adores the idol of efficiency: the idea that everything on the planet should be put to its most efficient use. (This is what neoliberals believe that unregulated capitalism ensures.) Yet, while idolizing efficiency, Max Boot has chosen to keep the nitrogen and phosphorus in his brain within his skull, rather than putting it to an unarguably more efficient use: organic fertilizer for one of the United States' booming organic farms. Rather than free the elements comprising his body from the stultifying regulation and heavy-handed control of the human body's organizational scheme, he has chosen to keep them so enslaved. This hypocrisy reeks more than Boot's decomposing corpse would in a tropical organic mango plantation.

Hopefully, a neoconservative with a commitment to a true freedom agenda will one day (soon) liberate the molecular constituents of Max Boot from their currently highly inefficient use, and, with the help perhaps of a deli meat slicer, set them free slice by slice to serve the neoliberal goal of their most efficient use: fertilizer.

...

Lest this strike you as a uniquely violent sentiment, I suggest you read about Boot's opinions on how to treat the world's unpeople by following the imperial British example. Violent, yes - unique, no.

(Evidently, an example of the kind of pornography Max Boot masturbates to.)

I support Hamas (licking my balls)

I've been keeping a Gaza death toll: as of today, 765 (230 kids) killed by the holy forces of good and light in self-defence; 7 (0 kids) killed by the bloodthirsty terrorist forces of evil and darkness.

A friend interpreted this to mean that I actually thought Hamas to be the holy forces of good and light, and the IDF to be the bloodthirsty terrorist forces of evil and darkness. He made an inference that is not unfounded, but is logically flawed. Of course I was being sarcastic. So I wasn't seriously asserting those moral assignments - good, holy, evil, bloodthirsty - as true. No one would, because the very numbers belie them. But it does not logically follow that I must believe the opposite. Just because I put the needle of sarcasm through the balloon of IDF righteousness and propriety, doesn't mean I inflate an equivalent balloon for Hamas.

Hamas can lick my balls. (I wouldn't enjoy it, but it would serve those homophobic fucks well.). A large percentage of their actions comprise charitable work, which is essential for the brutalized population, but their ideological bent is disgusting. In the context of the Palestinian struggle, the emergence of Hamas is comparable to a hypothetical ultra right Catholic reactionary group beating out the IRA in Ireland during the Troubles, and instituting Canon law in an over the top fashion, for instance executing women suspected of being "loose". Hamas is not too terribly different, in ideological essence if not particulars and position, from ultra right Jewish reactionary groups, like the ultra ultras in Jerusalem who use violence to enforce their religious norms. In fact, religious-militant Zionists like those who supported Rabin's assassination are much like Hamas, but in addition to their different religion they occupy a better power position and have disproportionate influence in a state with far superior weaponry. (Before his assassination, Rabin put it well, pithily criticizing reactionary rabbis "for whom perhaps the name ayatollahs is more fitting than rabbis.") Note that I am comparing here, not equating; and it is quite a revelatory comparison too, for those without oppressive ideological blinkers. To see the truth it reveals, one need only recall the immortal line of the Algerian resistance fighter in The Battle of Algiers, who, when asked by a French journalist to admit cowardice for using bombs hidden in women's baskets and such to kill innocent people, responded: "Of course, if we had your airplanes it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets." (Hamas head Khaled Meshal actually paraphrased this line in a recent interview with Counterpunch, to be published online soon.)

There can be no doubt upon any serious evaluation that if ultra-Orthodox Jews were living under the boot of a foreign occupier on their own land, that they would resort to the very best weapons they had at their disposal; likewise that if Hamas had access to bombers and tanks, they would immediately announce that they will attack solely military targets, and that heretofore any civilian deaths will be purely accidental and tragic. In fact, the religiousity of the two groups is nearly superfluous; just at the Stanford prison experiments demonstrated that anyone can become vile and violent under the right circumstances, any weaker group under the domination of a more powerful group will resist, often violently, with what they feel to be the most effective tactics available. Even suicide bombing is not the sole province of poor, religious fundamentalists; the most comprehensive study of its kind found that pre-2005, the “data show that there is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any one of the world’s religions. . . . Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland.”

At any rate, if one considers Hamas to be an enemy, the first step (advised by Sun Tzu in his Art of War) is to know it. Ideologically, Hamas and other violent Islamic fundamentalist groups are heavily influenced by the Egyptian intellectual Sayyid Qutb. In 1949, Qutb spent some time in the United States, and came away with the impression that Western culture - already massively influencing his native Egypt - was cold, heartless, materialistic and permeated with alienation. (True, there is a lot of alienation in Unitedstatesian society, but that has economic, not religious roots. If you look up "alienation" in an encyclopedia of intellectual history, you will find mention of Marx, not Mohamed. Qutb was also disgusted by what he saw as the oversexualization of the United States. In 1949. Idiot.) The movements Qutb inspired throughout the Muslim world from Afghanistan to Algeria had as a common goal the removal of Western cultural influence and political and military dominance. Like all conservatives in their various ways, these movements desired a return to an imagined golden age - that never existed.

Hamas emerged from cells of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, of which Qutb was a leader in the '50s and 60s. (The Muslim Brotherhood is Hosni Mubarak's sworn enemy, hence his brutal refusal to let even doctors cross the border to Gaza, which is controlled by Brotherhood offspring Hamas.) There is some evidence that the Israeli government actually supported Hamas in its early days as a divide-and-conquer technique to harm the secular nationalist PLO; at the very least, the Israeli government did little to impede Hamas in its early days, (a former Shin Bet chief put it this way: “We did not create it, but we did not hinder its creation”) while clamping down with its full force against the PLO.
Hamas and similar groups are adherents of fundamentalist Islam, which, despite its name, is an ideology in conflict with traditional Islam; different still is modern or liberal Islam. (Those interested in the differences between the three might look here.) The vast majority of the world's Muslims adhere to either traditionalist or liberal Islam (to illustrate by means of generalization, traditionalist Islam is dominant in Karachi and liberal Islam may be dominant in Dubai). As detailed in Adam Curtis' documentary The Power of Nightmares (downloadable here and streamable here), this adherence to traditionalist and liberal Islam both infuriates and confounds Islamic fundamentalists, who think that by overthrowing the venal, nominally Muslim leaders of the dar al-Islam (Islamic world), they will shake Muslims out of their theological slumber and usher in a new golden age of wise and just male religious leadership and chaste, clitoris-less women.

To paraphrase Chris Rock, I am not saying that I support Hamas. But I understand. As in, I understand why Palestinians support them. If it were the imaginary ultra right Catholic nutjobs who were the most viable fighting force against British occupation of Ireland, and I were Irish - I'd be conflicted and lukewarm - but I would support the Irish ultra-Catholic nutjobs as against the Brits. Add to this comparison the fact that Hamas has proven to be more effective than the Palestinian Authority in providing basic services to the population - and the fact of hundreds of noncombatants killed by Israeli bombs, bullets and shells - and you have a potent recipe for widespread Palestinian support of Hamas. Which, while I despise Hamas, I understand.

The International Goyish Conspiracy

It is time to recognize the existence of a diabolical conspiracy whose tentacles cover the globe: the INTERNATIONAL GOYISH CONSPIRACY!

Some may scoff and disbelieve, but its existence is clear to all those who EDUCATE themselves and pay attention to world events. Have you ever paid attention to votes in the United Nations' General Assembly? There you can find perhaps the STRONGEST evidence of the existence of the International Goyish Conspiracy. The General Assembly will regularly vote on the Israeli government's actions. These votes are set up in such a way as to offer only two options: the just and fair choice, and the anti-Semitic choice.

Take, for instance, the 2004 General Assembly vote on the International Court of Justice's decision condemning Israel's construction of a HOLY FENCE OF SAFETY FOR WOMEN AND CHILDREN AND PROTECTION AGAINST DEMONIC EVIL in the West Bank. The International Goyish Conspiracy saw to it that 150 countries made the anti-Semitic choice, by supporting the decision of the PATENTLY anti-Semitic International Court of Justice. The only countries to have eluded the grasp of the INTERNATIONAL GOYISH CONSPIRACY in this instance were the United States, Israel, Australia, the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau and the Marshall Islands.

(The International Court of Justice, remember, is composed of judges from the fair and knowledgeable United States, half anti-Semitic Britain, Arab-loving Russia, Arab-loving Madagascar, anti-Semitic Morocco, anti-Semitic Jordan, Arab-loving China, Arab-loving Sierra Leone, Arab-loving Venezuela, Arab-loving Japan, and five other anti-Semitic and Arab-loving countries. Not a single judge is from the only country on earth that G-d loves and cherishes above all others!)

Another strong piece of EVIDENCE demonstrating the INTERNATIONAL GOYISH CONSPIRACY is the world's reaction to Israeli's present mission of peace and love in Gaza. Already, most of the world has condemned the Israeli Defense Forces. The tentacles of this conspiracy have reached into Africa, South America and even China.

If this was not evidence enough, world public opinion delivers the knockout blow. There is no argument against the INTERNATIONAL GOYISH CONSPIRACY in the face of evidence of the opinions of common people throughout the world. The graph to the right clearly shows the grey/tan tentacles of the International Goyish Conspiracy's handiwork: the poisoning of the minds of the world's people to think that G-d's holy state is somehow "negative". From the world's most moderate Muslim country, Turkey, to the east Asian tigers like South Korea, the world has clearly been duped into thinking that Israel's treatment of the "Palestinians" is somehow bad.

The goyish forces of anti-Semitic propaganda have encircled the globe, and turned a clear morality story of a good, whiter and richer people defending itself from a bad, darker and poorer people into something else. Somehow, it seems the entire world - minus, of course, the United States and Israel - has been HOODWINKED, BAMBOOZLED AND TRICKED. Without any evidence whatsoever, the world's peoples seem to think that Israel is a nation where a religious fundamentalist minority and a chauvinistic, racist and/or just ignorant bare majority dominate government policy, leading the state to trample upon the "Palestinians" (that is, the goys currently living on the land G-d permanently deeded to His Chosen People).

(Don't forget, the International Goyish Conspiracy has recruited many Jewish collaborators, both in the United States and in Israel itself.)

The International Goyish Conspiracy has clouded the issue in the minds of the world's people. The goyish conspirators have underhandedly highlighted facts. Yes, facts - the last refuge of SCOUNDRELS! Facts such as that since 2000, Israelis have killed about 5,000 Palestinians, while Palestinians have killed about 1,000 Israelis (5:1 ratio); Israelis have killed over 1,000 Palestinian kids, while Palestinians have killed about 100 Israeli kids (10:1 ratio); Israelis hold nearly 11,000 Palestinian political prisoners, while Palestinians hold 1 Israeli political prisoner (11,000:1 ratio). There are many more such facts. Irrelevant facts.

As the cartoon below makes crystal clear, facts do not matter. What matters are INTENTIONS. Israelis intend to kill only BAD guys, while Palestinians intend to kill only INNOCENT GOOD guys. Therefore, as everyone who has not been taken in by the INTERNATIONAL GOYISH CONSPIRACY knows, everything Israel does is good, and everything the Palestinians do is bad.If there were no goyish conspiracy poisoning the world, people would clearly see that if an Israeli F-16 bombs a university and kills a bunch of students, that's OK, but if a Palestinian fighter shoots a brave IDF solider, that's evil. Why? Basic logic, of course. Basic logic that is covered up by the black clouds of INTERNATIONAL GOYISH CONSPIRACY PROPAGANDA! The Israeli air force MEANT to kill some extremist terrorists planning to kill Israeli women and children, while the Palestinian fighter MEANT to kill the soldier only as an afterthought, while hoping that the bullet would ricochet and hit an Israeli baby in a neonatal intensive care unit, severing its oxygen tube and starting a fire that would burn the hospital, killing hundreds of babies and old people, and spreading to the nearby pet store where cute Israeli puppies would also perish in the blaze.

I know that some people will call this a conspiracy theory. But before you take out your favorite weapon, Occam's Razor, allow me to use it myself. So you say that the true explanation for any given phenomenon will be the simplest, eh? Well, we can dismiss out of hand the simplistic explanation that most of the world's 6 billion people have come to the conclusion, after examining the facts, that the Israeli government is unscrupulously and illegally using its greater power to crush Palestinians and steal more of their territory. Theory dismissed; Q.E.D. What is still unexplained is why, outside of the U.S. and Israel, the dominant view of Israel is negative. Clearly, goyish conspiracy is the simplest explanation. Why would South Korea, for instance, have a negative view of Israel, what with Israel's far more sophisticated public relations capabilities compared to the Palestinians? For Chrissakes, Israel has spokespeople with impeccable British accents speaking for it, while Palestinian spokespeople interrupt every fourth word to emit an interminable, deep-throated "uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh"! Israel has the United States on its side, the country whose culture dominates the world in the form of its food, music, movies and videogames; yet we are to believe that the Palestinians' Libyan allies are carrying the day all alone? Ridiculous! The only rational explanation is that a vast INTERNATIONAL GOYISH CONSPIRACY is brainwashing the globe.

As the correct application of Occam's Razor demonstrates, if you want to see a conspiracy theory, LOOK ELSEWHERE. Here's a real tin-hat, crazy nutcase conspiracy theory: that public opinion in the United States and Israel are just two modern examples in a long line of countries and kingdoms, from Britain to Greece to Japan to Spain, whose violent depredations and mass-murders were viewed as justified by the domestic population - and whose justifications have since been discarded by the judgment of history as shameful rationalizations for revolting barbarism and inhumanity.

The ant and the grasshopper, squished

Back during the campaign season, I received an email with a modified version of the fable of the ant and the grasshopper. The original fable is about an industrious ant, and a lazy grasshopper; during the summer the grasshopper lives it up while the ant slaves away at storing food. When winter hits, the grasshopper starves and the ant survives. The moral, of course, is that you must defer pleasure indefinitely and live life like a Calvinist, or else you will die. And the hero of the story is the ant, a species that lives in a weird sort of feudal slave-type of social organization: something Calvinists could support.

See:
The Unitedstatesian version
The Canadian version
The British version (with squirrels - what the fuck? - they are Brits, whatever)
The Indian version
The Nepali version
The Maltese version
The South African version
The Australian version (again, with squirrels!)
The Pakistani version
The Singaporean version (watch out, it's actually clever)
The New Zealand version

There are probably many, many more, probably even in countries that were never part of the British empire.

The basic gist of all of these stories is this: leftists in every country are like grasshoppers whose desire for pleasure (in this case, the pleasure of helping one's fellow man avoid suffering) leads them to destroy the foundations of society - laissez faire capitalism - which ultimately makes everyone worse off. The only way to avoid this dire outcome is to take the example of the rightist ant, who (with great, if subdued, consternation of course) is willing to leave some to slave, suffer and die; but only for the exalted goal of ensuring that all do not perish.

The thing about these modified ant-and-grasshopper stories that would be hilarious - had their writers intended to use absurdity for comedic effect - is the assumption that the poor are poor because they are lazy. Such is not the case, and incontestably so. But the idea is so soothing to the consciences of those doing well in any given society, that reality has a tough time intruding and displacing the fiction. Another laugh riot about these stories is the idea that tampering with the status quo would be disastrous for society. As if most currently constituted societies were not already disastrous for wide swaths of the population. Perhaps this cartoon does the best job at updating the ant and grasshopper fable for modern times:

Where you and George W. Bush agree - and why you shouldn't

Back in November, walking in midtown Manhattan on my way to a conference on securities regulation (entitled "how to unspill milk", eh?), I read an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Bush Defends Capitalism Ahead of G-20 Summit" . Some hours later the article was renamed to be more blah: "Trade, Jobs Data Paint Gloomy Picture Before Bush's G-20 Economic Summit" (for proof see the link at the bottom of this page). But the original title was better, because Bush's speech was a defense of capitalism - at least its Unitedstatesian variant. And I thought it was interesting because most of the Unitedstatesians I know, informed by deficient Unitedstatesian media, would agree with Bush's overall defense.

I had planned to write about it, but thankfully I had a life that weekend so I passed on the opportunity. Henry C.K. Liu just took it on (China and the Global Crisis and Part 2), and so thanks to him I can vicariously follow through on what I had originally hoped to do.

(First of all, here's a transcript of Bush's speechwriter's speech.)

Liu: "President Bush [gave a] self-absolving explanation of the global financial crisis:

'The massive inflow of foreign capital, combined with low interest rates, produced a period of easy credit. And that easy credit especially affected the housing market. Flush with cash, many lenders issued mortgages and many borrowers could not afford them. Financial institutions then purchased these loans, packaged them together, and converted them into complex securities designed to yield large returns. These securities were then purchased by investors and financial institutions in the United States and Europe and elsewhere - often with little analysis of their true underlying value.

The financial crisis was ignited when booming housing markets began to decline. As home values dropped, many borrowers defaulted on their mortgages, and institutions holding securities backed by those mortgages suffered serious losses. Because of outdated regulatory structures and poor risk management practices, many financial institutions in America and Europe were too highly leveraged. When capital ran short, many faced severe financial jeopardy. This led to high-profile failures of financial institutions in America and Europe, led to contractions and widespread anxiety - all of which contributed to sharp declines in the equity markets.

These developments have placed a heavy burden on hardworking people around the world. Stock market drops have eroded the value of retirement accounts and pension funds. The tightening of credit has made it harder for families to borrow money for cars or home improvements or education of the children. Businesses have found it harder to get loans to expand their operations and create jobs. Many nations have suffered job losses, and have serious concerns about the worsening economy. Developing nations have been hit hard as nervous investors have withdrawn their capital.'"

First of all, note that even liberal Unitedstatesians would agree with this narrative. The disagreements between the left and right in the U.S. on the correct narrative to weave about the global financial crisis are minor enough to be entirely absent from Bush's account. Back to Liu:

"Notwithstanding Bush's attempt to blame the victims for the crime, the easy credit was not caused by massive inflow of foreign capital. It was the other way around.

The massive inflow of foreign-owned capital denominated in dollars was caused by easy credit that grew out of monetary indulgence on the part of the US central bank, which alone can issue dollars. This monetary indulgence enabled the US to sustain a current account deficit with a capital account surplus of recycled dollars.

The US has been consuming more that it produces through recurring trade and fiscal deficits made possible by dollar hegemony, sucking up wealth form its trade partners who are not in any position to increase domestic consumption because real wealth has been exported to the US in return for fiat dollars that cannot be used in the domestic economy without causing inflation. "

In other words, U.S. debt has been the nation's number one export. But foreign investors have not been buying it because they think it's the smartest investment to make - although now investors the world over are buying U.S. debt simply because it is seemingly the safest investment in a toxic environment. But the lion's share of U.S. debt has been "bought" by foreign governments whose banks receive dollars for all of their exports that are denominated in dollars - which is an awful lot, as despite the success of the euro, the dollar still dominates international trade. So foreign governments typically use these dollars to buy U.S. debt, which has allowed the U.S. alone in the world to run enormous deficits without facing - thus far - an Argentina or South Korea style meltdown. Foreign governments could sell these dollars for their domestic currency, rather than buying U.S. debt, so as to use this form of wealth (U.S. dollars) they receive for their exports to serve domestic development. However, this would raise the value of their own currencies, thereby making their products less competitive in the world's largest market: the United States'.

Liu goes on, noting that Bush's commitment to free markets has been compromised by the financial crisis, and he has made socialist interventions into the economy, e.g., wholly and partially nationalizing banks.

"President Bush said with a straight face about his ideological surrender:

'We are faced with the prospect of a global meltdown. And so we've responded with bold measures. I'm a market-oriented guy, but not when I'm faced with the prospect of a global meltdown. At Saturday's [November 15] summit, we're going to review the effectiveness of our actions.

Here in the United States, we have taken unprecedented steps to boost liquidity, recapitalize financial institutions, guarantee most new debt issued by insured banks, and prevent the disorderly collapse of large, interconnected enterprises. These were historic actions taken necessary to make - necessary so that the economy would not melt down and affect millions of our fellow citizens.'

The 'market-oriented guy' is forced to temporarily change his orientation toward massive government intervention in the market until the prospect of a global meltdown is averted. Since August 2007, the 'unprecedented steps' the US has taken have so far failed to stabilize market seizure, price volatility and loss of confidence. Equity market value has fallen over 50%. Major financial institutions had to be nationalized or allowed to go bankrupt. Financial sectors in all market economies are moving closer toward total collapse by the day. "

So Bush's socialist interventions into the economy have not been working so far. As Bush said, "[t]his crisis did not develop overnight, and it's not going to be solved overnight." Liu agrees, conceding that it "is true that the crisis took over two decades of flawed policy to develop." And the economic ideology forming the basis of "over two decades of flawed policy" will not be displaced overnight. Bush, along with most educated Unitedstatesians, believes that capitalism is still the best economic system available and that socialist interventions (that is, government regulation) inevitably muck things up. Liu writes:

"Showing his ideological conceit, Bush asserts that 'free market capitalism is far more than economic theory. It is the engine of social mobility - the highway to the American Dream.' He cites technological inventions as evidence of his ideological fixation. It is true that the US socio-economic system has produced much that benefited mankind, yet inventions are not unique to US capitalism. Historically, inventions also were made under feudalism, communism and even fascism. Bush concludes that 'today, the success of the world's largest economies comes from their embrace of free markets'.

By now, a case can be easily made with solid evidence that the failure of the world's market economies comes from their indiscriminate embrace of unregulated free markets."

A corollary point Liu could have made is that the success of the world's largest economies has only recently come from their embrace of free markets. As economist Ha-Joon Chang has convincingly demonstrated, the success of today's free market-embracing economies is due to their embrace of protectionism as they developed, and their subsequent embrace of and proselytizing for free markets once they had developed sufficient advantages in production. In other words, countries embraced free economic competition at the point at which they could compete successfully.

Bush gets to the heart of the matter later in his speech:

"Ultimately, the best evidence for free-market capitalism is its performance compared to other economic systems. Free markets allowed Japan, an island with few natural resources, to recover from war and grow into the world's second largest economy. Free markets allowed South Korea to make itself into one of the most technologically advanced societies in the world. Free markets turned small areas like Singapore and Hong Kong and Taiwan and into global economic players. Today, the success of the worlds largest economies comes from their embrace of free markets.

Meanwhile, nations who have pursued other models have experienced devastating results. Soviet Communism starved millions, bankrupt an empire, and collapsed as decisively as the Berlin Wall. Cuba, once known for its vast fields of cane, is now forced to ration sugar, and while Iran sits atop giant oil reserves, its people cannot put enough gasoline in their cars. The record is unmistakable. If you seek economic growth, if you seek opportunity, if you seek social justice and human dignity, the free-market system is the way to go.

(APPALUSE) [sic] "

This is an exposition of the conventional Unitedstatesian wisdom that only a small minority on the left-right spectrum of public debate in the U.S. would disagree with. Should you?

• "Free markets allowed Japan, an island with few natural resources, to recover from war and grow into the world's second largest economy." Nope. Japan followed a protectionist, imperialist form of development ever since the Meiji restoration crushed feudalism in the country and set it on a path of modernization, which included following the most successful examples in the world in terms of the military and economics: Europe and the United States. The economic portion of the example was characterized by state intervention and protectionism; only Britain, with the most advanced economy and powerful empire, preached (if not practiced) free markets at the time.
• "Free markets allowed South Korea to make itself into one of the most technologically advanced societies in the world." There is a grain of truth in this: the freedom South Korean corporations had to export to the United States' market certainly helped the former's economic development. But it was the freedom South Korea had, as a U.S.-allied dictatorship bordering North Korea and "Red" China, to develop its economy using judicious measures of state planning and protectionism that was the key factor driving its advance to become "one of the most technologically advanced societies in the world." Needless to say that Chile, as one of many examples, did not enjoy the same freedom.
• Free markets turned small areas like Singapore and Hong Kong and Taiwan and into global economic players." No they did not. Singapore and Hong Kong were turned into global economic players when Britain established them as trading posts in its empire. Taiwan was turned into a global economic player through incorporation into another empire: the Unitedstatesian empire. (Empires, by the way, are not reconcilable with "free markets".)
• "Soviet Communism starved millions, bankrupt an empire, and collapsed as decisively as the Berlin Wall." Indeed millions starved during the Soviet period; and yes, the empire was critically weakened by its military expenditures so it did face bankruptcy in a sense; and it is a trivial truth that it collapsed "as decisively as the Berlin Wall." Poorly-designed, overconfident policies, droughts, and paranoid, disconnected leadership led millions to starve. Facing the brunt of the Nazi war machine did not help either. But what is overlooked in our era - after the Cold War era of communists vs. capitalists, where nothing each side had to say was worth a penny to the other - is that the Soviet system resulted in unprecedented economic growth that turned Russia from a barely post-feudal, war-ravaged backwater into a global economic powerhouse. The Soviet system built an empire. Bush only notes that the empire "Soviet Communism" built eventually collapsed. It was stifled first by its own violent birth and the resulting, but also ever-deepening, sense of paranoia pervading its leadership. Always the capitalists were plotting to overthrow the Russian people's revolution - and often, they were. And it spent too much of its social product on military expenditures, though given its enemy one can understand the pressures that resulted in this allocation. Furthermore the Soviet leadership's fear of foreign propaganda led it to choke off information flows to a detrimental extent. But it is an unjustifiably long hop from these ideas to the idea that government intervention into the economy is universally doomed to failure.
• "Cuba, once known for its vast fields of cane, is now forced to ration sugar" Vast fields of cane - get it? Sounds like "vast fields of grain." Kudos to Bush's speechwriter. How romantic, those vast fields of cane, worked by slaves. Cuba rations a lot of things for different reasons. The reason sugar is rationed is not that it is rare in this island, "once known for its vast fields of cane"; Cuba produced 1.5 million tons of sugar this year. Regardless, is economic success measured by a reliance on exporting agricultural products? No. The U.S. economy would not allow for our vast fields of grain if it weren't for billions of dollars in agricultural subsidies. When the market sends the signal that your competitive advantage does not lie in agricultural products, that is universally recognized to be a good thing. Besides, Cuba's sugar industry has historically been used for a colonial or neocolonial master's use: Spain and the United States, respectively. It is neither a mark of pride nor an indication of Cuba's overall economic vitality. Nor is its decline such an indication. What is important is that Cuba's economy does a lot better for its people, by objective measures, than the economies of nearby Haiti, Jamaica or the Dominican Republic do for their respective peoples.
  
• "[W]hile Iran sits atop giant oil reserves, its people cannot put enough gasoline in their cars." This is a puzzling statement, if you take Bush's words seriously. Because to the extent to which Iranians cannot put enough gasoline in their cars, it is due to market forces and U.S. economic pressure. Could Bush have been so brazenly hypocritical if he was conscious of it? Not likely. The price of oil being high, Iran chooses to milk it for all it is worth, especially because powerful foreigners are constricting other parts of its economy. Milking for all its worth means refusing to subsidize domestic consumption. And Bush certainly would be aghast at subsidies - subsidies that foreigners use, that is.

And the final affront to reality: "If you seek economic growth, if you seek opportunity, if you seek social justice and human dignity, the free-market system is the way to go." How would Bush, his speechwriter, or anyone else know? Where is there a country with social justice and human dignity, opportunity and economic growth?

Book review: How to Be Idle

Book review: How to Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson

This book is a broadside against the insanity of capitalism; in particular the exploitation of workers, and the lives it utterly wrecks.

Quoted in a chapter discussing the insanity of the work world is Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness":

"Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?"

Robert Luis Stevenson's "An Apology for Idlers" is included at the end of the book, and it illustrates the humanism which is at the book's core:

"Extreme BUSYNESS, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality... There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. Bring these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will see how they pine for their desk or study. They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless Necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk: they CANNOT be idle, their nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill. When they do not require to go to the office, when they are not hungry and have no mind to drink, the whole breathing world is a blank to them... To see them, you would suppose there was nothing to look at and no one to speak with; you would imagine they were paralysed or alienated; and yet very possibly they are hard workers in their own way, and have good eyesight for a flaw in a deed or a turn of the market. They have been to school and college, but all the time they had their eye on the medal; they have gone about in the world and mixed with clever people, but all the time they were thinking of their own affairs. As if a man's soul were not to small to begin with, they have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another... now the pipe is smoked out, the snuff-box empty, and my gentleman sits bolt upright upon a bench, with lamentable eyes. This does not appeal to me as being a Success in Life. ... Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things... The ends for which they give away their priceless youth, for all they know, may be chimerical or hurtful; the glory and riches they expect may never come, or may find them indifferent; and they and the world they inhabit are so inconsiderable that the mind freezes at the thought."

Hodgkinson fills his writing with penetrating anecdotes. From a chapter on sleep: "I see ads on the London Underground for energy drinks and pills which claim to provide wakefulness to the user. One current ad runs the line: 'Drained? You needn't be.' It claims that such 'daily fatigue' can be 'beaten' by taking little capsules containing various vitamins. You don't get ads on the Underground saying 'Tired? Then Sleep More'."

The latter is the kind of shit you only see in Cuba.

From a chapter on partying, Hodgkinson quotes the philosopher Theodor Adorno writing the most sensible thing I have read from the latter's keyboard: "If the satisfaction of instinctual urges is denied or postponed, they are rarely kept under reliable control, but are most of the time ready to break through if they find a chance. This readiness to break through is enhanced by the problematic nature of the rationality that recommends postponement of immediate wish-fulfillment for the sake of later complete and permanent gratifications."

From a chapter on conversation: "Ideas emerge in conversation and are embellished, improved, contradicted or torn apart by the assembled company. Friends will come up with anecdotes that either affirm or disprove some notion. One's ideas are developed, modified. They are taken down from the museum shelf, dusted and put on view. And their true worth is revealed: the diamond turns out to be a piece of glass, the dusty stone a rare fossil." Conversation is incredibly important not only for the individual but for society as a whole. But good conversation is hard to come by in a society where leisure time is a luxury.

From a chapter on the pub: "Fashion took the drinking culture and made the licensed establishment a place to be seen rather than a place to talk and think. In fact, in most of these places it's actually impossible to talk or to think as the banging techno is at ear-splitting volume. What looks like a 'buzz' from the outside is in fact a collection of half-drunk, lonely, insecure people trying to make themselves heard above the din. One becomes hoarse with shouting, and the conversation, such as it is, is punctuated by long periods of staring at the clientele simply because one can no longer be bothered to shout. I was once told that they reason for the high volume levels was profit: 'if you're not talking, you're drinking' was the theory. Commerce killed the pub."

On "The Death of Lunch": "Observing 1930s New York, Lin Yutang also complained that the speed of life was destroying the pleasure of eating. 'The tempo of modern life is such that we are giving less and less time and thought to the matter of cooking and feeding ... it is a pretty crazy life when one eats to work and does not work in order to eat.'"

...

In summation, as "G.K. Chesterton [a writer beloved by conservative Roman Catholics] put it in What's Wrong with the World (1910):
'The rich did literally turn the poor out of the old guest house on to the road, briefly telling them that it was the road of progress. They did literally force them into factories and the modern wage-slavery assuring them all the time that this was the only way to wealth and civilization.'"

Bedbugs in Bratz

Toys of Misery Made in Abusive Chinese Sweatshops - May also be carrying Bed Bugs by the National Labor Committee

"Young workers in China who make holiday toys for Disney, Hasbro and RC2—including Bratz dolls—are suffering from a serious infestation of bed bugs in their dorms. Workers report that their bodies are often covered with red welts from the bug bites, which can easily become infected if the wounds are scratched. A leading entomologist at a major university confirmed to the National Labor Committee that it would be very possible for bed bugs to hitch a ride to the U.S., especially if they hid the cardboard toy boxes."

You've got to wonder about the sense of justice God has. She/He/It/They (or S.H.I.T. for short) does have a sense of justice, it's just skewed.

Like in this case for instance. Here Unitedstatesian and European parents are buying these cheap toys for their precious little children. They can afford to buy so many of them because the Chinese workers who make them work 96-hour weeks, are paid peanuts and cheated out of 40% of their already low wages, and sleep in horrid, bedbug-infested dorms. (Also the environmental degradation caused by OUR toys happens in THEIR country. Those polluting bastards!) The justice part is that now the bedbugs that attack the workers are hitching a ride in the toys to infest little Tommy and Jane's beds.

I see what You're doing S.H.I.T., but to better serve justice why couldn't You just eliminate the exploitative conditions instead of spreading bedbugs to pay back the rabid consumers whose demand for lots of cheap shit - no offense - occasioned the exploitation?

Bomb bay and Hindoofascism

Who knows who did it - no one yet. The attackers might have been Pakistani Muslims, they might have been Indian Muslims... Or something else. They might not have been Muslim at all; perhaps it was a false flag operation run by the Hindu right, or, my favorite monniker, the Vedic Taliban. (My apologies to the Taliban, who don't literally idolize Hitler and Mussolini.)

The Vedic Taliban is an umbrella term for an alphabet soup of organizations sharing the common dream of a "Shining India" made rich and powerful by whatever economic ideology happens to be reigning and most politically advantageous at the moment. And, additionally, by ethnically cleansing the country of non-"Hindus" - a concept whose application is at least as stupid as the concept of "Aryan" is in application to Germans. My favorite organization in this alphabet soup is the unfortunately-named Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJ Party. Unfortunate, of course, for blowjobs, which do not deserve the association. (As in the cartoon, its logo is a lotus flower, and its favorite weapon for hoisting the fetuses cut out of pregnant Muslims post-gang rape is a trishul, or trident.) For a Unitedstatesian audience, perhaps the best name for the whole lot of them, from the BJ Party, to the RSS, to the VHP, is Hindoofascists. Unlike the "Islamofascists", for whom political philosophy ended when Allah sent the last page of the Quran floating down from heaven, Hindoofascists love them some newfangled thinkers like Mussolini. The Vedic Taliban also has a somewhat less than charming infatuation with Hitler. From a high school textbook in Hindoofascist state of Gujarat: "Hitler lent dignity and prestige to the German government within a short time by establishing a strong administrative set up. He created the vast state of Greater Germany. He adopted the policy of opposition towards the Jewish people and advocated the supremacy of the German race. He adopted a new economic policy and brought prosperity to Germany." And he had such nice things to say about Aryans - which the Hindoofascists consider themselves to be.

What with Hindoofascism such a strong force in India, you had better believe the Anti-Defamation League, with its mission to "secure justice and fair treatment to all" and to fight "all forms of bigotry", is all up in their Hindoofascist faces. Oops. Not so much. Guess when we say "Never Again!" we mean "never again will we allow Hitler in 1939 Germany to start a world war that resulted in... etc."

At any rate, if you look at who benefits most from this attack, it is clearly the Hindoofascists. They have an election coming up in a few months, and the BJ Party, with its troll-looking president LK Advani, is looking to win. I saw this troll on NDTV on the day of the attack; they had the feeble ghoul on for an eternity, yammering away like a crazy old patriarch on his deathbed, as if he were a Fox anchorman. An anchorman who will be milking the Bombay attack like a rBHT-enhanced cow udder for the next few months of the presidential campaign. Nothing like a little domestic terrorism to yolk the locals into voting for the right, and getting them to ignore the murderous poverty they'll continue to live... er, die... under during Hindoofascist BJ Party rule.

But bringing up the concept of "voting" might suggest to some that India is a democracy, as in, a functioning democracy, as in, a society where political power is shared equally by all. In reality, where the earth is round, India is a "democracy" only in the sense of a country where an uninformed, uneducated and overburdened electorate is swayed by political propaganda/advertising into voting for politicians whose only true loyalty is to the elite. Whose only true loyalty, in turn, is to enriching themselves at the expense of the poor and their land. Winston Churchill said that the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. If he had taken a five-day trip through modern India, he might have changed his mind.


So the Indian government says, to no one's surprise, that the culprits were Pakistani Muslims. But when the Indian government speaks on responsibility for acts of terrorism, it speaks with all the credibility of Karl Rove giving an ethics seminar. Regardless, it seems that most Indians have bought this explanation. And it may well be true - it would certainly make some sense (Mumbai: Exporting Pakistan’s Resources by Gary Brecher). Besides, determining responsibility solely on the basis of who benefits most from an act is a misleadingly incomplete method of inquiry.

What is important at this point is not so much who did it - because we just do not know (As the Fires Die: The Terror of the Aftermath by Biju Mathew) - but what the response will be. And in a country where Viagra is accessible only to the rich, political commentators are urging the country to follow the example of an aroused penis, by engaging in a "hard" response, and avoiding being "soft". Where on the hard/soft spectrum the cushy-sounding "carpet bombing" falls I do not know, but it has been advocated as the proper treatment for Pakistan. As Mathew writes:

"The dead are on the floor. The vultures are moving in. The conjecture will try to unite the country into a series of unexamined positions. That POTA [Prevention of Terrorism Act - the Indian Patriot Act] must be recalled. That States must be allowed to pass even more draconian laws. That Hindu terror is not a big issue and must be forgotten for now - especially now that we may not find an honest policeman or woman to head the ATS [Anti-Terror Squad]. That the defense budget must go up. That the coastline must be secured.

None of the well educated masters of the media will write that the 7000 odd kilometer coastline cannot be protected - that all it will translate to is billions in contracts for all and sundry including Israeli and American consultants. Nobody will write that a hundred POTAs will not prevent a terror attack like this one; that Guantanamo Bay has not yielded a single break through. Nobody will write that higher defense budgets have been more often correlated with insecure and militarized lives for ordinary citizens. Nobody will write that almost without exception all of US post-9/11 policies have been disasters. Bin Laden is still around, I am told and so is the Al Qaeda. The number of fundamentalist Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Jews have probably gone up over the last decade. So much for good policy. But the conjecture will go on.

The foreign hand and its internal partner will be floated without ever naming anything precise. But the country will read it just as it is meant to be read - Pakistan and the Indian Muslim. Everything will rest on the supposed confession of the one gunman who has been captured. A Pakistani from Faridkot, I am told. Why should we believe it? Didn't the same Indian State frame all the supposed accomplices in the Parliament attack case? Didn't the same Indian State claim that the assassins of Chattisinghpura were from across the border until that story fell apart? And more recently, didn't the same Indian State finally agree that all the accused in the Mecca Masjid bombings were actually innocent? And even if Mr. Assassin supposedly from Faridkot did say what he did say - why should we believe him? Why is it so difficult to believe that he has his lines ready and scripted? If he was willing to die for whatever cause he murdered for, then can he not lie? Oh the lie detector test - that completely discredited science that every militarized State trots out. And the media love the lie detector test because it is the best scientific garb you can give to conjecture.

I certainly don't know the truth. But I do know that there is more than enough reason for skepticism."

...

Most important to recognize amid all of this, is that the death toll of 195 in these attacks was small change for India. This is terrifyingly vulgar to say; but more relevantly, true. India grinds through 6,000 children's lives every day due just to hunger; and these are just kids. Adults, as you might imagine, needlessly die too. Fuck, if Bombay was following the annual average from 2002-2003, it would take just two weeks for the Bombay train system to kill as many people as died in these attacks. But what makes these attacks such a big deal is that these weren't just a bunch of Adivasis (also known as "tribals" in India) dying out in the countryside. A good number of the victims of this attack were rich enough to afford a night's stay at the Taj or Oberoi, which costs more than two years' wages for the vast majority of Indians. (Praise be to the Free Market!) This, and the fact that the attack can be used as a pretext for war against Pakistan or (more) pogroms against Indian Muslims, means that the victims were actually important. To a Hindoofascist, after all, to be that rich one must have been saintlier than Nathuram Godse, Ghandi's Hindoofascist assassin, in one's previous life.

So now, according to leading intellectuals in New Delhi and Bollywood, Pakistan and Muslims must pay. Which is why the tragedy of of "26/11" has yet to begin.

P.S.
Sterling dumbfuck Fareed Zakaria recently wrote:

"I think India is showing remarkable resilience. They're trying to get back to business as usual. They were planning to open the stock market, which is not far from the Taj; they ultimately decided that that might have been a bridge too far, but they're encouraging people to go back to work. That's the best thing about an open society. They're trying to project an image of resilience."

To which an intelligent observer responded:

"Remember the Republocrat resilience rhetoric?

What else can you do? What else especially the subcontinent's working poor and middle class can do? From New York, I called my sister and nephew in Mumbai on the morning after the terror strike. Both of them work in the private sector, one as a receptionist, and other as a junior computer professional. Both of them told me that their companies had not called them yet not to come to work, even though it was extremely dangerous to go out and even in Mumbai where the subway is the lifeline of millions of commuters, it was all but shut down. Resilience? Of course, my sister and nephew must go back to work and 'show courage' to stand up against those ghastly cowardice forces. Or else, Zakaria must know, the private sector would show them the door.

Welcome to the globalized, neo-liberal, Wall Street-modeled world, India being at its forefront, along with its corrupt, criminals and crooks."

Dear Barack,

A recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal has it that your administration's foreign policy will be defined, at least initially, by U.S. policy towards Indonesia. The Journal goes on to recommend that you reject change and uphold the status quo U.S. foreign policy, which the Journal in its innocence of the lives (and deaths) of the world's poor thinks is wise counsel. It is not.

This country, to say nothing of the world, will swiftly take back all of the goodwill it has so generously lent you thus far, if you kick hope and change to the gutter and carry on the traditional U.S. foreign policy that has always been selfish, ignorant and malevolent (only in practice, rarely if ever in intent).

Send a clear message, via Indonesia, that the U.S. will no longer associate with thugs and goons in fancy military and business attire. Even when doing so will mean a loss of business activity or military influence.

You can bring the U.S. one step closer to having a foreign policy founded on justice, rather than narrow pecuniary interest. That step is your policy towards Indonesia.

Book review: The Dialectics of Globalization: Economic and Political Conflict in a Transnational World

The Dialectics of Globalization: Economic and Political Conflict in a Transnational World by Jerry Harris

This book is basically Tom Friedman's The World is Flat - just without the idiocy. Harris' main thrust is that the traditional view of political economy, that views nations and their industries in competition with each other for global dominance, is no longer valid. Globalization has created an international economic elite, or "transnational capitalist class" (TCC), whose interests differ from those of the capitalist class - really classes - of history, which were divided by national boundaries. In the past, capitalists in Britain and France and other countries sought to "'establish the largest possible economic territory[,] to close this territory to foreign competition by a wall of protective tariffs, and consequently ... to reserve it as an area of exploitation for the national monopolistic combinations'" (in the words of Austrian economist Rudolf Hilferding).

But not anymore. "The new character of world trade ... [is] transnationalization. Between one-third and two-thirds of world trade is now conducted as intra-firm trade, a clear commercial expression of globalized production." De jure imperialism is dead, and now it makes little sense to speak of economic elites who work towards expanding their nation's territory, so they can profit within the safety of protectionist barriers to foreign competition. Today there is an transnational economic elite whose opportunities for profit cross national boundaries - as do their loyalties. The tendency of businessmen Jacques Hébert wrote about in the 18th century is even more visible today: "Everywhere and at all times men of commerce have had neither heart nor soul; their cash-box is their God. ... They traffic in all things, even human flesh. ... Their country? Foutre! Business men have no country."

The problem with neoliberalism, the ideology championed and implemented by the TCC, is that it does not provide the bread and circuses for the poor saps at home. Back in the days of de jure imperialism, plundered wealth from abroad would pay for the bread and circuses that kept exploited classes at home from upsetting the power structure. As Cecil Rhodes wrote in 1895, "'I was in the East End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for 'bread, bread,' and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism... in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands... The Empire, as I have always said is a bread and butter issue. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.'" Today's capitalism does not allow for the 'wild speeches' of the unemployed to be quieted by bread paid for through the exploitation of 'new lands'. "Neoliberal globalization is a different kind of project. It is a class-based project without a broad-based national strategy. Instead of an expanding middle class and improving conditions for the working class we see a shrinking middle class and growing unrest. Public schools are underfunded and falling apart, health care is expensive and being privatized, wages have fallen or stagnated for 80 percent of the working population, job insecurity is growing, the prison population is expanding, and large sections of the minority community are cast into deepening poverty with welfare harder to get. Globalization is not a project that enriches the nation, rather it limits the social contract to a shrinking base of highly skilled workers mainly situated in information technology. A world surplus of cheap labor and open markets has undercut the need for broader social entitlements. The result is the elimination of economic nationalism as the basis for social inclusion in the modern nation/state."

Hence, the dissent that erupts even in the first world today.
...

The transnational capitalist class (TCC) Harris writes about is not ideologically homogeneous (thank god); and his explanation of their differences is enlightening. In the U.S., it is easy to see how these differences play out. As Gore Vidal is fond of saying, the U.S. has a one party system; it features the property party with its two wings, Democratic and Republican. Harris would put it this way: there is one TCC, or globalist, party with two wings: Republicans correspond with the free-market conservative wing, and the Democrats correspond with the Third Way wing. Harris writes: "To better understand the politics of globalization we need to examine the tactical and strategic issues that generated divisions in the TCC. These started before Seattle and continue to plague the TCC as events change and develop. The globalist ruling bloc developed three main groups or factions: the free-market conservatives, the structuralists, and the regulationists. The debates at the summits of power in global society do not correspond to the familiar political categories of the pre-globalization era. The distinct positions of these factions have less to do with narrow economic-corporate interests than with strategic political issues of class rule. Foremost is the question of how best to structure the new global economy, achieve world order, and assure the long-term stability and reproduction of the system.
...
In a nutshell, the free-market conservatives call for the complete freedom of capital based on an undiluted version of the Washington Consensus. The structuralists want a global superstructure that can provide stability to the volatile world financial system, adjusting the Washington Consensus without interfering with the global economy; and the regulationists call for a broader global regulatory apparatus and institutional power that could stabilize the financial system as well as mediate some of the sharpest social contradictions of global capitalism in the interests of securing political stability. Eventually both the regulationists and structuralists positions merged to created [sic] a post-Washington Consensus known as the Third Way. This important faction held some neo-Keynesian concerns about education, health and the social well being of society. But they never questioned the basic prerogatives of transnational capital or free market ideology. A more fully developed neo-Keynesian globalism emerged only after some of the sharpest critics of the Washington Consensus began to understand the shallow character of Third Way reforms. In addition, a powerful bloc of Southern globalists arose with what has been called the Beijing Consensus..."

"[Battles within the World Bank between Joseph Stiglitz and Lawrence Summers] over Third Way direction led to a separate policy orientation by a neo-Keynesian wing. Stephen Roach, the chief economist of Morgan Stanley Dean Whitter became a consistent critic of 'slash-and-burn' neoliberalism and predicted an inevitable worker backlash as a by-product 'of an era that has squeezed labour and yet rewarded shareholders beyond their wildest dreams.' Ricardo Hausman, chief economist of the Inter-American Development Bank warned that, 'Emerging markets are not merely investment opportunities[;] they are entire nations with families, firms, and political systems" and that a rebellion against market-oriented reforms was sure to develop. MIT economist Paul Krugman declared, 'Why did I become a radical? I didn't want to be. But we are in a trap.'
...
Dani Rodrik ... writes, 'After more than two decades of application of neoliberal economic policies in the developing world, we are in a position to pass unequivocal judgment on their record. The picture is not pretty.' Rodrik criticizes the 'worsening income inequalities in most of the countries that have adopted the Washington Consensus,' higher poverty rates and the painful financial failures in a dozen countries. 'The few instances of success have taken place in countries that have marched to their own drummers...China, Viet-Nam, India...which have violated virtually all the rules in the neoliberal guidebook.'"

In summary, in the TCC there is a free-market conservative wing (whose ideological legitimacy is sure to be decimated by the financial crisis), and a Third Way wing split into neo-Keynesians like Stiglitz and structuralists like Summers.

So how is the transnational capitalist class doing at running the world economy? Well... it's not working out too well. But the blatantly obvious reasons for the troubles have not made it through many skulls, filled as they are with the fantasy world of neoclassical economics. Just as a witch doctor believes in angels and demons that influence and shape what happens in the world, neoclassical economists and their followers believe in invisible forces that underly the world economy, and like Alan Greenspan, are "shocked", shocked when they discover that the reality of these forces is actually quite a bit doubtful.

The situation is grim for global capitalism as currently constituted. Germany provides a good example of the problem all OECD countries face: a decline in economic growth and private sector investment. "Of course private investment has gone abroad, yet transnational capitalists continue to blame high wages and welfare for stagnation even as they worry about weakening consumer markets" - though today the Europeans and the Chinese seem to be beginning to recognize that this is not the problem. "The internal logic of transnational capitalism remains in force because of global competition. After all, why invest in Germany when low-age countries like Poland, China and Mexico are hungry for jobs? Their only answer is to destroy the economic model linked to the previous social structure of national accumulation. These changes are underlined by the expansion of the EU to Eastern Europe with their attractive low wage and tax structures. Even Austria has moved to cut their corporate tax rates and labor protection laws attracting high-profile defections from Germany. While workers continue to protest offshoring, Germany's six top economic institutes warned against political moves that would deprive businesses of tax advantages and 'reduce the productivity gains afforded by specialization within the international division of labour.' The global organization of labor expands low-wage manufacturing abroad creating greater unemployment and underconsumption at home resulting in a glut of overproduction on a world scale. In turn, this propels the demand for cheaper labor and longer hours to create a competitive labour market in Germany, and somehow all this is supposed to lead to a renewal of a vigorous consumer market."

In other words, the first world is being squeezed in a pincer action. Unless out of technical necessity, no one wants to build factories in a rich country where the cost of labor is high, so factories are built in poor countries where a larger profit can be made due to the differential in the cost of labor. But the cost of labor is also the strength of the market - one company's employee is all other companies' consumer. So the company that offshores production to poor countries still has to sell in the rich countries, and the cumulative effect of offshoring production is to reduce the ability of rich countries' markets to consume. Until recently, rich countries like the U.S. and Britain were consuming at full tilt thanks to the mercy of credit. But credit's hard to come by now, and its return is far on the horizon.

Harris also provides an antidote to the kind of know-nothing drivel Tom Friedman likes to spout about India, noting that India's much-trumpeted IT sector employs only one million out of 1.1 billion people. The majority of India's population hasn't met with the friendly side of globalization; farmers especially. "[R]eforming the agricultural sector to fit the global economy will cause widespread displacement of small farmers that dominate the countryside. India has subsidized local food production to insure supplies for their population, and about 58 percent of the national workforce is still on the land. Only 40 percent of India's farmland is irrigated with little mechanization and few large-scale farms, and the World Bank estimates that India accounts for 40 percent of the world's poor living on less than a dollar a day. Increasing agricultural productivity eventually means larger farms, more machines and diversification of crops to serve the international food market. Such reforms would throw millions off the land and into the cities. But the industrial sector and infrastructure simply don't have the ability to absorb such a massive structural shift. Unless the Congress Party and its left allies can devise a different strategy it is doubtful they will be able to avoid future political upheavals from the mass of poor peasants. Unlike China's radical rural revolution that swept away old feudal relations, India's countryside is still dominated by landlords who stand in the way of development. Mao's revolution actually cleared the path for modernization, a huge task still faced by India's rural population. In India there are 250 million peasants making less than $1 a day, the world's largest child labor force, and an armed Maoist insurgency that covers 25 percent of the national territory." Remember reading those facts in Tom Friedman's book? No? Don't worry, there's no problem with your memory.

But if global capitalism has been harsh on third world countries, it is starting to cast its chill on the first world as well - even in countries whose implementation of capitalism tended to be a lot easier on their people. "Europe, Japan, and the US have developed three models of Northern capitalism. But unlike the US, the European and Japanese models developed through historic compromise with non-capitalist forces. The social-democratic model in Europe was forced upon the capitalists by socialist political parties and a class conscious trade union movement. The resulting European welfare state was a temporary historic compromise forced on capitalism by its industrial age opposition. Japanese style capitalism developed out of the Asian statist form of agrarian society in which there was collective responsibilities within the social hierarchy. These patterns carried over to state-sponsored capitalism and translated into corporate commitments to job security and other social benefits. The historic compromise was with pre-capitalist social obligations.

In the US agrarian statism never existed and the socialist opposition was never as strong as in Europe. US capitalism was able to develop more rapidly with less social restraints towards a pure market culture. As globalization develops it allows the European and Japanese capitalist to jettison their historic compromises and move towards a more fundamental and pure form of capitalism. A capitalism freed from historic restraints and free to exhibit all of its natural tendencies towards naked materialism and competition at all levels of society. But these are not particularly American values, rather this is the culture of capitalism that is being universalized through globalization."

And this culture of capitalism has always been hard on the majority of people within the system: those on the bottom, or more accurately, those not on the top. It's just that in the past, the majority of those "not at the top" were in far off colonial possessions, whereas now more than ever, this category comprises a majority of people within first world countries. The culture of capitalism is not changing, it is just that its dark side is being experienced more and more in the first world. "After all, where was the social democratic nature of European capital in the Third World or Japanese social obligations in its Asian empire? Think of the British in India, French in Algeria, or Japanese in Korea. How rapidly the human face of capital disappeared revealing its truer spirit once it left its home shores. Now globalization frees European and Japanese capital to follow their natural impulses and logic at home. Does the character of Shell Oil in Nigeria somehow magically change when it operates in Britain? With globalization the specter of capitalism in the Third World can now haunt the developed countries."

This, along with the fact that nationalist economic polices are nearly impossible to implement in a transnationalized economy, is the silver lining in the cloud that is the global economy di merda. Nationalist trade wars make a lot less sense when corporations don't have much of a national identity. After all, what is the appropriate protectionist policy when the corporations listed in your country have the majority of their holdings and sales overseas? And although Einstein warned against underestimating the power of human stupidity, one would think that the ecological and economic ruin currently-constituted capitalism is wreaking upon the world would spur humanity to devise a better system. Unfortunately, for the time being, the world economy is run by the merchant class - not a class of scholars by any means. In the philosophy of Confucius, this makes our present world system an absolute, upside-down nightmare. Time will tell if we manage to wake up.

Dear Barack,

Stand true to your campaign promises for a expedited withdrawal from Iraq. Give Bob Gates the boot. Explaining your decision is easy as pie: "We preach democracy, and we practice it too. The majority of Americans want an end to the war, and to bring our troops home. I will follow their will. The Iraqi people want an end to the war, and the withdrawal of foreign troops. They too will see their democratic will implemented."

Also, support the Fair Elections Now Act. Lessen campaigns' reliance on political propaganda - television and radio ads - that they must shake down wealthy interests to fund. This goes hand in hand with media reform: the populace desperately needs a media whose function is not profitmaking, but to disseminate knowledge upon which decisions can be made. James Madison wrote that "a popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both." We live in both a farce and a tragedy; now, let us write the postscript.

Help wanted

Dear Barack,

What is going on with your appointment of advisers and subordinates - or at least the rumors about whom you will appoint?

Supporter of the Israeli rightwing fringe Rahm Emauel!?

Supporter of the Hindu fascist movement, or "Vedic Taliban", Sonal Shah!?

Eviscerator of civil liberties Jane Harman!?

Ideologue of a patently and proven-to-be false economic theory Robert Ruben, and implementer of that theory (leading to great destruction in Eastern Europe and Russia) Lawrence Summers!?

War criminal (as history will view him; remember, history will not be written by an American proponent of today's conventional wisdom) Robert Gates!?

Pro-Middle East destabilization, anti-Palestinian (hence anti-the-views-on-the-conflict-held-by-95%-of-the-world) Dennis Ross!?


Change and hope, eh? Say it ain't so, Barack, please say it ain't so.

Rough Draft of My Speech at Nuremberg - Why I Supported Obama

I'm supporting Barack Obama, if only because he's younger and has been in Unitedstatesian politics for less time, and so has not been doing Satan's work for quite as long as McCain. It also helps soothe my conscience that he isn't a war criminal, guilty of gruesomely murdering a minimum of dozens of men, women and children in Vietnam. Maybe, just maybe, if Obama is elected, he'll be ideologically unmoored enough to be pushed by popular pressure (should that ever materialize) away from the fellatio he's been vigorously performing on Satan, for just long enough to do some good - before the assassin's bullet cuts him down, of course.

But let me first tackle the primary non-reason why I am supporting Obama: race. Many of his supporters are ecstatic at the thought that a Black man (in the Unitedstatesian idea of "race," one of two parents of African ancestry makes one "Black" - one of six parents and grandparents being of African ancestry might make one "Black" or "mixed") has a serious chance of winning the presidency. This they like because it makes the United States look better in their eyes. And yes, no doubt, the country has come a long way in its treatment of ethnic minorities.

It used to be, in New York as in many other places in the country, that Irish, Italians, Poles and Jews were known as 'white niggers' and occupied the lowest rung on the societal ladder, along with Blacks. Yeah, it's kind of nice in a way when JFK showed that even a 'papist' 'mick' could become president, but I doubt that there were too many Vietnamese thinking at the time: "Gee, sure is nice that a member of an ethnic minority that used to be oppressed by the WASP ruling class in the United States is now President. That makes me feel better about the napalm burning alive the members of my village and the American soldiers raping the women in my family." I don't think too many Mozambicans ever said "you know what takes the sting out of having our children kidnapped and turned into child soldiers by a CIA-supported army, is the fact that Jews and Italians have overcome institutional barriers in U.S. society to occupy some of its leading positions." Nor does it seem likely that the dying thought of an Iraqi/Lebanese/Palestinian child, after being slowly suffocated under the weight of what used to be his/her house after being hit by a Unitedstatesian bomb, was ever "there is at least some consolation in the fact that senior members of the U.S. administration are members of long-oppressed minorities: Blacks, women, LGBT people and Latinos." Or, to take a more distant example from a century ago: while hundreds of thousands of Filipinos were being killed during the U.S. invasion and occupation, which Filipino thought to himself, that "the massacre of my neighbors and family would almost be bearable if only it weren't for the fact that blacks, Chinese, Latinos, Native Americans, Eastern and Southern Europeans, Jews, etc., are being oppressed right now in the U.S.A.; it would be a great comfort in the face of my people's genocide if that weren't so"? Likewise, if Obama ever follows through on his anti-Iranian tough talk, I wager that we won't find many dead Iranian bodies with smiles on (what's left) of their faces, evidently relieved at the thought that the U.S. President who ordered their murder has a Black father.

Point being, it is undeniably a good thing that some members of some oppressed ethnic minority groups in the U.S. have improved their lot somewhat. But it fades into absolute insignificance next to the horrific barbarity the U.S. government may very well continue to engage in an Obama presidency.

Speaking of horrific barbarity, the guy who will win if Obama loses has some first-hand, active rather than passive, experience in this department. John McCain, in his own words, is "guilty of war crimes against the Vietnamese people. I intentionally bombed women and children." Lest this confession be mistaken for a first step towards repenting for his war crimes (the second step being committing seppukku, without an agony-ending swordsman at the ready), it should be noted that these words, according to McCain, are what his Vietnamese torturers forced out of him, not what he admitted to be true.

Yes, his Vietnamese captors ordered McCain to confess to bombing women and children - and all because he did bomb women and children. While McCain would probably consider it evidence of martial valor if he did, he of course did not bring all of the estimated 3-4 million Vietnamese noncombatants (as if the murder of combatants defending their country is any less odious) to their violent deaths: deaths assortedly instant, mercifully short, slow by suffocation due to rubble or blood, slow by loss of blood, slow by shrapnel-penetrated organ failure, and slow by serious burn wounds. Yet over the course of his twenty-three bombing runs in Vietnam, he certainly killed many. It doesn't tax the imagination to think that a president McCain would almost certainly be more likely than Obama to send Unitedstatesians around the world to meet many exotic people, and kill them.

So one reason to support Obama is that a win for him is a loss for McCain. However, there is one nearly convincing argument that a McCain win would be a good thing for the world.

The U.S. government under Bush has finally been realized to be a great force for violence and theft in the world by the majority of its inhabitants, except perhaps in seriously benighted parts of the globe, like Albania, (formerly) Georgia (state and country), and India. Even Unitedstatesians and Israelis, while not comprehending the violence and theft part, at least look upon the Bush-led Unitedstatesian government with dissatisfaction. This is a major accomplishment. Add to that, of course, the overstretching of the Unitedstatesian military to the point that even a newly-nuclear DPRK - or the old standby, democratically-elected Latin American leftists - can't provoke its use to kill a bunch of Koreans and Central and South Americans.

Bush has also overseen the near-destruction of the U.S.-dominated international economic system, and the possible unseating of the U.S. and its dollar from the throne of international economic hegemony. These are relatively large steps towards a world free of the mass murder and exploitation that have been the means by which the U.S. government has successfully achieved its ends. Hey: destroying trillions of dollars of wealth, which is property - which is theft - is a goal any true leftist should aspire to. Bush did it, and McCain is likely to carry on his legacy.

As the argument goes, a McCain win would hasten the downfall of the U.S., thereby making the world a better place. Perhaps. But I'd want to ask permission from some Iranians, Russians, Koreans, Venezuelans, Bolivians, Cubans, Zimbabweans, etc., first before supporting McCain, or even not working to make him lose.

Unfortunately, the only person who can make McCain lose the election is Obama.

I fear that Paul Street is accurate in calling Obama an "authoritarian corporate-imperial insider ... a relentless ideological triangulator, a clever racial accommodator and political opportunist." And while I fervently hope it to be true, I suspect the pseudonymous Spengler, writing in Asia Times Online, is a bit too fantastic in writing:

"Obama profiles Americans the way anthropologists interact with primitive peoples. He holds his own view in reserve and emphatically draws out the feelings of others; that is how friends and colleagues describe his modus operandi since his days at the Harvard Law Review, through his years as a community activist in Chicago, and in national politics. Anthropologists, though, proceed from resentment against the devouring culture of America and sympathy with the endangered cultures of the primitive world. Obama inverts the anthropological model: he applies the tools of cultural manipulation out of resentment against America. The probable next president of the United States is a mother's revenge against the America she despised. ... [A mother who] brought the six-year-old Barack into the kitchen of anti-colonialist outrage [in post-'67 Indonesia], immediate [sic] following one of the worst episodes of civil violence in post-war history."

One-upping Spengler, many right-leaning Unitedstatesians are actually fearful that, despite his campaign-trail rhetoric and published books, Obama plans to introduce (or reintroduce, after a horrific first impression called the Red Scare) socialism to the United States. (See, for instance, BARACK OBAMA HID HIS FATHER'S SOCIALIST AND ANTI-WESTERN CONVICTIONS FROM HIS READERS) If only that were the case.

Spengler inadvertently makes a good point, however. A resurrected Karl Marx would not be able to win a Unitedstatesian presidential election - and neither would any unabashed leftist. Rather than unabashed, to win a Unitedstatesian election (in any other place besides perhaps a condominium in a few urban neighborhoods) a leftist must be extremely circumspect. The intellectual environment of the United States mirrors its physical environment: religiously, it is to a disturbing extent like the swamps of Louisiana and Florida; in terms of knowledge about foreign countries and their intellectual currents it is like the deserts of the West and the Great Plains of the Midwest; its susceptibility to nationalist propaganda replicates the Mississippi's weakness for industrial and agricultural chemical runoff; its hostility to new and challenging ideas does honor to the interplay between the Pacific's waves and the magnificently imposing cliffs of California's coast. And it is in this intellectual environment that ideas, and the politicians who espouse them, must survive and propagate.

This is why the electoral struggle in the U.S. is so close to complete meaninglessness. To move the country down a healthy evolutionary path, one can only attempt to elect the candidate who would at most (at least?) moderate the variously parasitic effect of the minority economic elite's desired policies upon the majority economic non-elite. From the start of every election there is no chance whatsoever that any candidate advocating a major evolutionary shift in policy will win. Within this electoral realm, the only promising strategy available mimics the Chinese proverb: each election is just a single step on a thousand-mile journey.

An analogy to marketing is actually more than just an analogy: it's a close cousin. Besides religious beleivers, what organized group of humans is routinely successful at winning an intellectual struggle by convincing people of things they hadn't believed before? Marketers. (Madmen, and ad men.) They start with the goal of convincing millions of people who have never heard of Brand X product that Brand X product is the best product of its kind; and they often succeed. Sometimes they can even convince people to believe they have a previously unknown (and usually sexual attractiveness-impairing) defect that Brand X product can correct. How do they succeed? Not by explaining the chemical constitution of Brand X product or the methodology of the tests that tended to show that Brand X product performs its task better than Brand Y product with 90% confidence that the correct percentage difference lies within plus or minus 2.5 percentage points of 15%. That's too accurate and informational. Instead, the teams of psychologists hired by marketing firms will identify which subconscious desires can be manipulated to convince the target audience to buy Brand X product. Then the creative team will, under the guidance of other psychologists, come up with a mixture of sights and sounds to
manipulate the identified subconscious desires to get the target audience to perform the target behavior: buying Brand X product like it's going out of style. And why do they forsake the path of knowledge dissemination and rational argumentation? Because it doesn't work. If it did, it would be used. That's one gold standard litmus test our kind of economy excels at.

Another example. It is probably economically efficient, factoring externalities, for the country to produce its energy in a manner that can be continued indefinitely: sustainably. However to get the kind of revenue needed to recoup some significant start-up costs, the target audience - the whole country - would need to be made willing to pay a premium price. And unless they are aimed at the leisure class for whom a premium price can be desirable in itself, they are devilishly hard to sell. To sell a few hundred million of a target audience on paying a premium price for sustainable energy, they would first need to be educated about climatology, economics, and technology - for starters. No 30-second commercial, or succession therof, can possibly hope to accomplish this. After all, despite their enormity, the benefits of sustainable energy production are less apparent than the benefits of an expensive car (status, sex, comfort). Therefore, the constraints of marketing shape what can possibly be successfully introduced into the marketplace - or the polity, which has pretty much become a synonym for it.

Backing someone like Brian Moore, Cynthia McKinney or Ralph Nader in a Unitedstatesian presidential election is an instance of futility. It's like trying to break into the high-speed computer processing industry as a start-up company. Even as Microsoft it would be difficult to accomplish; as winning a presidential election has proved even for capably self-financed Ross Pierot.

The ideological and political affinities of an unabashedly leftist candidate are foreign to the target audience/electorate they need to reach. One's ideology is one aspect of the story one tells about the world (and why it is the way it is, and how it should be). One's story about the world is largely based on facts - things we know or think we know to be true. The facts we know and believe to be true form the skeleton of our story about the world - our ideology - and so the scope for our respective ideologies is limited by the facts we know. Therefore, the ideologies that
can possibly exist within a given target audience (population, electorate) are limited by the facts that are known by them. The facts that enable one to take up a leftist ideology - for instance, the facts that comprise world economic history - are absent in any appreciable number from the Unitedstatesian population. In order to successfully back a Moore, McKinney or Nader the population would have to be taught a large body of facts, and then convinced to change their narratives to account for these facts. Only then would a majority of the population vote for an unabashed leftist.

Thorstein Veblen offers a good summary of the difficulties of changing people's minds:

"[t]he process of readjustment of the accepted theory of life involves a degree of mental effort - a more or less protracted and laborious effort to find and to keep one's bearings under the altered circumstances. This process requires a certain expenditure of energy, and so presumes, for its successful accomplishment, some surplus of energy beyond that absorbed in the daily struggle for subsistence. ... The abjectly poor, and all those persons whose energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance, are conservative because they cannot afford the effort of taking thought for the day after tomorrow; just as the highly prosperous are conservative because they have small occasion to be discontented with the situation as it stands today."

In the United States today, the conservative class of "those persons whose energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance," or debt repayment, is broad indeed; and the conservative class of highly prosperous persons with "small occasion to be discontented with the situation as it stands" control the means of disseminating ideas.

And so far I've only addressed one aspect of the intellectual battlefield: how to convince people whose ears you have. But how to even get to them? How do you do logistics? How to supply an entire country with regular deliveries of facts for the foundation and ideas for the edifice? This logistical realm is fraught with even greater difficulties for leftists; and as the saying goes, soldiers win battles but logistics win wars. The means of production and dissemination of ideas - television and radio stations; book, magazine and newspaper presses; schools, universities and think tanks - are effectively controlled by an economic elite who benefit most from the economic system as-is. And following the trend in other means of production like assembly lines, media technology is far more powerful today than its 19th or early 20th century counterpart. While a small independent newspaper could put up some appreciable resistance in the 19th century struggle for men's minds, today it simply could not compete with the idea machine par excellence, television, which Unitedstatesians subject their brains to an average of four hours a day. Little wonder then that the public sphere, home to the arena in which political ideas compete, is utterly dominated by ideas that support the status quo. Today's public sphere is soaked with the most psychologically and technologically advanced economic propaganda (commercials) the world has ever seen, along with an analysis of world affairs provided in political "news" coverage whose left extreme is not far beyond what Mussolini would have been prepared to contemplate. Meanwhile, most of the people comprising the public sphere are exhaustively concerned with keeping their jobs, credit scores, families and lives together: and this is the arena in which leftists would attempt to engage people in an exhaustive discussion of the social order, and why it needs changing through electing an unfamiliar candidate with unfamiliar ideas.

The only thing one can hope to achieve during a Unitedstatesian presidential election is to defeat the candidate furthest to the right by working to elect the other elite-approved candidate to his left. Hopefully over the next four to eight years organized lobbying and outreach efforts will open new opportunities to shift the population to the left, so that during the next election, the next elite-approved, furthest-right candidate will be further to the left than his predecessor was; and likewise with the candidate to his left.

This may seem to some a strategy that can only unfold at a glacial pace; by that I mean the pace a glacier moves at, not the pace at which they are currently melting. This is true - but so much the worse for reality, not for the strategy with the most promise of changing it. This is the extent of hope in the United States. Any other source of hope can only be located without. The country, and perhaps the planet.

This is troubling for some. There are those around the world who know certain facts of vanishingly uncommon occurrence in the population of Unitedstatesian brains: such as the precise number of thousands of people who die daily from hunger, preventable diseases and political violence; the sources and causes of such violence; and how these results emanate from a world economic system (that has, as George W. recently discovered, "interlinks").

Add to this list facts and ideas about how the relationship of this economic system to any given country is the result of historical developments; and the facts of the historical development of the world's countries, most of which experienced what is called a "colonial period" - and not like the United States'. Knowledge of these facts tends to facilitate, in the brain's narrative realm, a connection between the economic system and the needless, painful deaths of millions each year, for no other motivation than that which is the currency of the system: self-interest or greed, for Smith and Marx respectively. The story that emerges from the putting together of these facts is a story that places the status quo, the present international economic system with the U.S. at its head, as the actor responsible for the most perverse outcomes and contrasts imaginable. Like the deaths of nearly 10 million children, annually, due to diseases prevented and cured by inexpensive interventions, while hundreds of billions of dollars worth of human labor and capital are used to produce killing machines, and to research and develop deadlier ones. Or the 218
million child laborers, over half of whom work in dangerous conditions: conditions the children of the very same world's ten million millionaires will be strangers to, to put it mildly.

Like the recently much-publicized Bill Ayers, there are many throughout the world whose grasp of facts such as the ones just mentioned lead them to desire the destruction of such a system by any means necessary. In countries on the periphery of this system, organized violence has succeeded in overthrowing its local representatives. In Haiti, Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam and other countries, most recently Nepal, organized violence has extricated the population to a great extent from the global economic system responsible for horrifying atrocities the provenance of which the vast majority of Unitedstatesians fail to accurately identify. In each of these countries, guerrillas waged a successful military campaign and, in different ways, won control of the country. Mao wrote that guerrillas are like fish, and the population is the water in which they swim; in China, the communists were able to rely upon the population for recruitment and material support as they fought asymmetric war against two much better supplied armies. In other countries with ultimately unsuccessful guerrilla struggles, like Peru, anti-guerrilla forces have taken Mao's words to heart, and have drained the water, so to speak, by massacring entire villages suspected of sympathizing with the guerrillas. Or they have poisoned the water with propaganda and fear spread by the murder of public figures suspected of even a trace of leftist affinity.

In the United States, there would be no need for an anti-guerrilla force to drain or poison the water a prospective guerrilla army would need to survive. The water has been pre-treated to be inhospitable to guerrillas. The most powerful idea-spreading technologies in history have been almost exclusively devoted to spreading resistance to the idea of radical change of any sort, least of all by violent means. On top of this, the trappings of formal democracy serve to convince Unitedstatesians that the system of power ruling their lives can be changed simply by pushing a few buttons every couple of years. Perhaps most importantly, class lines are damn near invisible to Unitedstatesian eyes; meanwhile "race" certainly is visible, and is a potent concept piggybacking on the universal human tendency to think in terms of in-groups and out-groups.

Class-consciousness is a rarity in the United States, coming to the fore only in rare instances, like when the mere millionaire (who considers herself "rich") realizes that she cannot live like those with a net worth greater than $100 million. A guerrilla movement supported by the masses needs a broad-based class consciousness like a fish needs oxygen in water; and in the United States, the fish would have no oxygen.

The only potential guerrilla force with a shred of a chance of success of winning power in the United States would be a nationalistic, reactionary, religious and very likely racist group of well-armed fanatics. And even they would have to contend with a PR war in which the status quo forces control all the high ground (in terms of controlling television, newspapers, radio and, should the need arise, the internet). Guerrillas could be fighting to establish a government and economy under direct democratic control, and yet every household in the nation down to the remotest log cabin in Alaska would be delivered the message that the guerrillas are power-hungry despots intent on enslaving the population and selling their daughters into United Nations' brothels. How would a guerilla force deliver their competing message to 300 million people spread across thousands of miles?

Despite these difficulties, it is impossible to predict with total accuracy the eventual outcome of something as complex as an organized, armed struggle that could last many years. Yet such a struggle is farthest from the minds of those leftists who deplore Obama because, based on his public record and some of his writings and rhetoric, he seems to be a center-right politician. (As if successful politicians in the United States even have essences so much as degrees of stubbornness with which they partially resist organized political pressure.) The same people who (rightly) consider there to be only one political party in the U.S., with Republican and Democratic factions, who cannot as a matter of principle vote for any candidate of the Party, including Obama - these people almost down to a man renounce violence as a political tactic, and instead exhaust the implementation of their political strategy with tactics such as loosely organized protest rallies featuring Halloween costumes and less-than-clever rhyming chants. Their goal is to pressure the government into adopting their principles of non-violence and a peaceful, nonexploitative foreign and domestic policy; and so following the example of no successful organized political minority group in history, wage their struggle through public displays of political carnival mixed with civil obedience.

In thinking about these people, I now understand was god was talking about when he wrote in his last Christian, and most snazzily-titled book, Revelation: "Since you are lukewarm and neither hot nor cold, I am going to spit you out of my mouth." If their goal is to build a mass movement by spreading their ideology, then they can at least begin with an organized program of mass education. At least they could do what the Jehovah's Witnesses do. And if they instead are earnest in their desire to end a monstrous international economic system, if necessary using violence to stop violence, they could begin military training and attempt to spread their beliefs at the same time. But what are the Unitedstatesians who don't support Obama actually doing?

Whether you as a matter of principle renounce violence, or if you do not, but simply think that present conditions make violence a losing tactic, the only remaining option in the United States is to work to get Obama elected, making friends and contacts, and learning about political organization in the process. After he is elected, keeping the movement's political activity alive by lobbying the government, this time following tactics successful lobbies use. Of course, not all lobbying tactics will be within reach financially, and new ones will have to be developed. Above all, what is necessary is organization, and unity of purpose.

Is there an alternative?

Book review: Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality

Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality by José Carlos Mariátegui

José Carlos Mariátegui is one of Peru's most influential left intellectuals. He had poor health from a young age, though he managed to work his way up the ranks of the newspaper industry, becoming an influential and astute social critic. His paper's opposition to the government of a former New York Life Insurance Company executive gained him the animosity of the military coup-installed government, and he was comfortably exiled on government salary to Europe (lucky he was born in 1895 and not 1945!). There he absorbed himself with the political developments of the continent, which he brought back to Peru years later.

This book explains the history of Peru from the Incas to Mariátegui's time (he died in 1929). He describes the Incas as administering a kind of theocratic communism - clearly bucking the orthodox Marxist line that communism is a stage of development reached only after intermediary steps. Then came the Spanish. "The colonial regime disrupted and demolished the Inca agrarian economy without replacing it with an economy of higher yields. Under the indigenous aristocracy, the natives made up a nation of ten million men, with an integrated government that efficiently ruled all its territory; under a foreign aristocracy, the natives became a scattered and anarchic mass of a million men reduced to servitude and peonage."

Mariátegui goes on to criticize the Spanish for bringing "to America the effects and methods of an already declining spirity and economy that belonged to the past": feudalism. Whereas with capitalism in "the North, there were no kings to dispose of another's land as though it were their own. Without any special favors from their monarchs and in a sort of moral rebellion against the kind of England, the colonizers of the north proceeded to develop a system of private property under which each one paid the price of his land and occupied only as much as he could cultivate" (as put by a non-Marxist writer Mariátegui quotes).

The stage of economic and political development of Peru during Mariátegui's day was called "gamonalismo," or bossism. Gamonalismo represented but a tiptoe step beyond colonial feudalism - the Spanish king was no longer sovereign over Peru, but the same large landowners who used to be his most powerful subjects now ruled. And they ruled in much the same way that the Spanish had, except the surplus extracted by the ruling parasites off the backs of Indian laborers now went to the parasites themselves, rather than being shared with the capo di tutti capi, the king of Spain. Capitalist development in Peru was stunted from the beginning by extreme concentration of wealth and the inefficiencies it creates.

It is interesting the degree to which what Mariátegui writes about the oppression of the Indian under Peruvian gamonalismo can be applied to oppressed ethnic minorities all over the world; African-Americans under U.S. capitalism, for instance:
"The moral and material misery of the Indian is too clearly the result of the economic and social system that has oppressed him for centuries. This system, which succeeded colonial feudalism, is gamonalismo. While it rules supreme, there can be no question of redeeming the Indian.
"The term gamonalismo designates more than just a social and economic category: that of the latifundistas or large landowners. It signifies a whole phenomenon. Gamonalismo is represented not only by the gamonales but by a long hierarchy of officials, intermediaries, agents, parasites, et cetera. The literate Indian who enters the service of gamonalismo turns into an exploiter of his own race. The central factor of the phenomenon is the hegemony of the semi-feudal landed estate in the policy and mechanism of the government. Therefore, it is this factor that should be acted upon if the evil is to be attacked at its roots and not merely observed in its temporary or subsidiary manifestations."
...
"Gamonalismo is fundamentally opposed to the education of the Indian; it has the same interest in keeping the Indian ignorant as it has in encouraging him to depend on alcohol. The modern school - assuming that in the present situation it could be multiplied at the same rate as the rural school-age population - is incompatible with the feudal latifundium. The mechanics of the Indian's servitude would altogether cancel the action of the school if the latter, but a miracle that is inconceivable within social reality, should manage to preserve its pedagogical mission under a feudal regime. The most efficient and grandiose teaching system could not perform these prodigies. School and teacher are doomed to be debased under the pressure of the feudal regime, which cannot be reconciled with the most elementary concept of progress and evolution."

And applicable to Peru in the 1920s, but fascinating nonetheless:
"Gamonalismo or feudalism could have been eliminated by the republic within its liberal and capitalist principles. But for reasons I have already indicated, those principles have not effectively and fully directed our historic process. They were sabotaged by the very class charged with applying them and for more than a century they have been powerless to rescue the Indian from a servitude that was an integral part of the feudal system. It cannot be hoped that today, when those principles are in crisis all over the world, they can suddenly acquire in Peru an unwonted creative vitality."

Even while describing Peruvian reality - in this case the aristocratic rule of Nicolás de Piérola - Mariátegui could be timeless - or very timely today: "The democratic caudillo, who for so long had thunderously aroused the masses against the wealthy, now took pains to carry out a civilismo administration [supportive of the status quo]. His tax system and fiscal measures removed any possible doubts that might have been raised by his phraseology and metaphysics. This confirms the principle that the meaning and shape of men, their policy and deeds, are more clearly revealed on an economic than on a political level."

Book review: World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction

World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction by Immanuel Wallerstein

This book, and the world-systems approach, is an antidote to learning about the world by following "current events" in "the news" - the kind of approach taken, for instance, by people who were surprised by the onset of the current financial crisis.

"Part of the problem is that we have studied these phenomena in separate boxes to which we have given special names - politics, economics, the social structure, culture - without seeing that these boxes are constructs more of our imagination than of reality. The phenomena dealt with in these separate boxes are so closely intermeshed that each presumes the other, each affects the other, each is incomprehensible without taking into account the other boxes.
...
World-systems analysis meant first of all the substitution of a unit of analysis called the 'world-system' for the standard unit of analysis, which was the national state. On the whole, historians had been analyzing national histories, economists national economies, political scientists national political structures, and sociologists national societies. World-systems analysts raised a skeptical eyebrow, questioning whether any of these objects of study really existed... they substituted 'historical systems' [for these objects].
...
[The] world-economy was said to be marked by an axial division of labor between core-like production processes and peripheral production processes, which resulted in an unequal exchange favoring those involved in core-like production processes. Since such processes tended to group together in particular countries, one could use a shorthand language by talking of core and peripheral zones" or of core, peripheral, and semiperipheral states depending on the types of production processes predominant in each particular state. Core processes are those which are relatively monopolized (oligopoly) and highly profitable (think aerospace and genetic engineering); peripheral processes are relatively free market and less profitable (think textile manufacturing). "When exchange occurs, competitive products are in a weak position and quasi-monopolized products are in a strong position. As a result, there is a constant flow of surplus-value from the producers of peripheral products to the producers of core-like products. This has been called unequal exchange.
...
The strong states, which contain a disproportionate share of core-like processes, tend to emphasize their role of protecting the quasi-monopolies of the core-like processes. The very weak states, which contain a disproportionate share of peripheral production processes, are usually unable to do very much to affect the axial division of labor, and in effect are largely forced to accept the lot that has been given them. [] The semiperipheral states which have a relatively even mix of production processes find themselves ... [u]nder pressure from core states and putting pressure on peripheral states. ... These semiperipheral states are the ones that put forward most aggressively and most publicly so-called protectionist policies. ... They are eager recipients of the relocation of erstwhile leading products, which they define these days as achieving 'economic development.'"

Peripheral states would be the G8, and the OECD countries; semiperipheral states would be the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries, and peripheral states would be those also called underdeveloped or "least developed countries." This is a much clearer and more useful perspective than that of looking at the world solely as what this or that particular nation is up to.

Pressure and the press

The Washington Post endorses Obama by Alex Lantier

"On the economy, the Post saw Obama as a conservative candidate, who would 'respond to the economic crisis with a healthy respect for markets' and oppose more left-leaning elements in his own party.

The Post noted the fact that Obama 'has surrounded himself with top-notch, experienced, centrist economic advisers [is] perhaps the best guarantee that...Mr. Obama will not ride into town determined to reinvent every policy wheel.' According to Obama’s comments at the October 15 presidential debate, these advisers include multibillionaire investor Warren Buffett and ex-Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker.
...
The Post added, 'A silver lining of the financial crisis may be the flexibility it gives Mr. Obama to override some...in his own party who oppose open trade, as well as to pursue the entitlement reform that he surely understands is needed.' In other words, the Post calculates that Obama would use the crisis to justify cuts in social programs like Medicare and Social Security."

Yes, Virginia, the election of Obama is just the beginning. Without a sustained, organized effort to push Obama to the left, the only force operating will be the establishment - represented here by the Post - pushing him to the right.

Book review: The Marijuana Conviction

The Marijuana Conviction by Richard J. Bonnie and Charles H. Whitebread II

The only reason marijuana is illegal is that it was introduced to the country by non-European ethnic minorities, during a time when the country was dealing with widespread opiate and cocaine addiction, and because Prohibition and the social forces surrounding it had firmly introduced the 'illegalization' model in dealing with drug use into the country's psyche.

(I take it that no one any longer wrongly believes marijuana to pose an actual public health risk - if you do, kindly hop in a time machine to the thirties where you belong.)

Due to fear of 'the other', non-European ethnic minorities and their drug, and the profit motive applied unscrupulously to the newspaper business, an anti-drug crusader at the head of the then-Federal Bureau of Narcotics was convinced that marijuana was an incredibly dangerous substance (it led Negroes and Mexicans to rape white women, for instance). He in turn added to the anti-marijuana propaganda blitz, which through lurid, misleading anecdotes and spurious "scientific" research which ignored the body of scientific research dating from before the propaganda blitz, convinced the public that marijuana caused insanity and inexorably led to violence and sexual crimes. His successful propaganda efforts got Congress to write laws sending users of a pharmacologically harmless substance to federal and state rape, labor and human rights-denying camps - prisons - for many years.

Once middle and upper class white kids started to use it in the 60s - woah, then things got to changing. "The scientific propositions attending the application of the narcotics consensus to marihuana had always been assumptions tied to broader social perceptions of the using class. But these assumptions no longer coincided with social expectations when use of the drug was taken up by society's privileged classes. The basic proposition that use inevitably became abuse was quickly challenged. ... Similarly the causal relationships between marijuana and crime, idleness, and incapacitation were now more difficult to maintain. The new users were not 'criminals' or social outcasts. They were sons and daughters of the middle and upper classes. In short, when the consensus against marihuana lost its sociological support, it immediately lost its scientific support as well."

In other words: poor black and brown people being sent off to rape camps for doing nothing harmful? That's OK. But when Billy and Susy start getting kicked out of university for a five year prison sentence... well let's take a look at that marijuana science again. The 60s' and 70s' saw a renaissance of actual scientific investigation into marijuana, after a long hiatus, and found that marijuana is a remarkably nontoxic substance. Some tried to translate science into policy, but with limited success.

However, the public propaganda starting in earnest in the 30s had been too successful. Even now, "cultural conservatives" ensure that a rational marijuana policy is simply too much for the United States to implement.

The upside of this policy of sending users of a harmless substance to mental health-destroying federal and state rape and institutionalized violence camps? Once people realize that marijuana is harmless and its criminalization is the summit of both cruelty and absurdity, then they are, with respect to government policy, down the rabbit hole. Which in the United States is very, very deep.

Book review: they thought they were free

they thought they were free: the germans 1933-45 by milton mayer

(Note to publisher: thanks for choosing a bright red cover with prominent swastika! I'm sure it helped you sell books, but it got me a bunch of nasty looks on the subway... dick.)

Fascinating account of an Unitedstatesian Jewish journalist who lived in Germany, became friends with ten former Nazis, and told their stories: about how they allowed themselves, or actively chose to, become a part of the Nazi machinery. Mayer does an excellent job of allowing readers to put themselves in German shoes, letting them imagine Nazis as an in-group rather than a demonic enemy out-group. And the scary thing is how natural this book makes the transition seem...

Perhaps the truly scary thing is how Unitedstatesians consider themselves to exist on a much higher moral plane - that it is anathema for us to consider how we too could sink to the same moral depths we know so well our enemies inhabit.

"Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, appalled by the absence of public protest in America [at the great fire raid on Tokyo which according to the Air Force produced more civilian causalities 'than any other military action in the history of the world'], thought 'there was something wrong with a country where no one questioned' such acts committed in its name." Indeed there is something wrong with such a country. And it is information, and access to it.

Within Nazi society, there were horrors, "but these were advertised nowhere, reached 'nobody.' Once in a while (and only once in a while) a single crusading or sensation-mongering newspaper in America exposes the inhuman conditions of the local county jail; but none of my friends had ever read such a newspaper when there were such in Germany (far fewer there than here), and now there were none. None of the horrors impinged upon the day-to-day lives of my ten friends or was ever called to their attention. There was 'some sort of trouble' on the streets of Kronenberg as one or another of my friends was passing by on a couple of occasions, bu the police dispersed the crowd and there was nothing in the local paper. You and I leave 'some sort of trouble on the streets' to the police; so did my friends in Kronenberg. ... Man doesn't meet the State very often."

...

"None of my ten Nazi friends, with the exception of the cryptodemocrat Hildebrandt, knew any mistrust, suspicion, or dread in his own life or among those with whom he lived and worked; none was defamed or destroyed. Their world was the world of National Socialism; inside it, inside the Nazi community, they knew only good-fellowship and the ordinary concerns of ordinary life. ... That Nazism in Germany meant mistrust, suspicion, dread, defamation, and destruction we learned from those who brought us word of it - from its victims and opponents whose world was outside the Nazi community and from journalists and intellectuals, themselves non-Nazi or anti-Nazi, whose sympathies naturally lay with the victims and opponents. These people saw life in Germany in non-Nazi terms. There were two truths, and they were not contradictory: the truth that Nazis were happy and the truth that anti-Nazis were unhappy. And in the America of the 1950's - I do not mean to suggest that the two situations are parallel or even more than very tenuously comparable - those who did not dissent or associate with dissenters saw no mistrust or suspicion beyond the great community's mistrust and suspicion of dissenters, while those who dissented or believed in the right to dissent saw nothing but mistrust and suspicion and felt its devastation. ... just as there is when one man dreads the policeman on the beat and another waves 'Hello' to him, there are two countries in every country."

...

"The 'democratic,' that is argumentative, bill-collector, Herr Simon, was greatly interested in the mass deportation of Americans of Japanese ancestry from our West Coast in 1942. He had not heard of it before, and when I told him of the West Coast Army Commander's statement that 'a Jap is a Jap,' he hit the table with his fist and said, 'Right you are. A Jap is a Jap, a Jew is a Jew.' ... He asked me whether I had known anybody connected with the West Coast deportation. When I said 'No,' he asked me what I had done about it. When I said 'Nothing,' he said, triumphantly, 'There. You learned about all these things openly, through your government and your press. We did not learn through ours. As in your case, nothing was required of us - in our case not even knowledge. You knew about things you thought were wrong - you did think it was wrong, didn't you, Herr Professor?' 'Yes.' 'So. You did nothing. We heard or guessed, and we did nothing. So it is everywhere.' When I protested that the Japanese-descended Americans had not been treated like the Jews, he said, 'And if they had been - what then? Do you not see that the idea of doing something or doing nothing is in either case the same?'"

Hoping IBD got it right just this once...

Investors' Real Fear: A Socialist Tsunami by Investor's Business Daily

Investor's Business Daily: the source you can turn to for sound investment advice. So long as you have access to a time machine and can travel into the future to read future issues, to take advantage of IBD's 20/20 hindsight.

Like the IBD's (opposite of) prescient analysis of the subprime market-induced credit crisis: blame it on the Democrats' interference with the market beginning with Carter. Too bad their foresight wasn't so hot: their editorial page mentioned the word "subprime" three times in one editorial from '98-'04.

This gem details how Obama desires to implement socialism in the U.S. Please god, let the IBD be right, just this once?

Robbing Peter to pay... Peter's creditor

Governments got religion after peering into the systemic meltdown abyss: aggressive and comprehensive policy action is now likely but significant downside risks to markets will remain by Nouriel Roubini

" A key policy tool – that is currently missing in the G7 and EU plans is to use fiscal policy to boost aggregate demand. ... If the private sector does not spend and/or cannot spend old fashioned traditional Keynesian spending by the government is necessary. It is true that we are already having large and growing budget deficits; but $300 bn of public works is more effective and productive than spending $700 bn to buy toxic assets. I[f] such fiscal stimulus plan is not rapidly implemented any improvement in the financial conditions of financial institution[s] that the rescue plans will provide will be undermined – in a matter of six months – with an even sharper drop of aggregate demand that will make an already severe recession even more severe."

OK, so the experts who work for the world's economic elite, who live on the top of a pyramid are scared because the pyramid's capstone is deteriorating and looking unstable. So they wisely decide not to allow nature to take its course. Instead they try to reinforce it, by taking bricks from the pyramid below the capstone. Amazing.

Eh, but why listen to a crank like Roubini (note foreign-sounding name!), he's only been uncommonly prescient over the past few years... for an economist.

Book review: The Battle for China's Past

The Battle for China's Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution by Mobo Gao

The book's thesis: that the dominant narrative about China in the US is also the dominant narrative about China in China. In China, it is dominant in the sense that it reigns supreme within the brains of the elite, who dominate the media and academia in a far more direct fashion than in the U.S. So foreign scholars who read the most easily accessible Chinese sources are reading sources from those Chinese who supported Mao's revolution only insofar as it was the most likely to succeed at ejecting foreign imperialists (the Japanese, British, etc.) and allowing the Chinese elite to make China a strong country in the sense that the U.S. is a strong country: in that its elite would have sway on the international scene, while the majority of China's people would eke out a more or less marginal existence. The Chinese writers foreign scholars read are those that Mao called "capitalist roaders," in that they wanted for China to take the capitalist road to national greatness, rather than the socialist road which would distribute wealth more evenly, thereby frustrating the emergence of a stratified Chinese elite who would then enjoy a sufficient concentration of resources to wield some power on the international stage - like in the old days.

Gao makes this case, and then demonstrates how on the most loosely regulated media, internet websites, a coterie of intellectuals representing an arguably much larger segment of the Chinese population convincingly argue that under Mao's leadership, China made incredible economic advances that formed the foundation for China's recent GDP growth spurt.

Most interesting excerpt:

"A good test case would be to compare China, the largest communist country, with India, the largest democracy, using labels for convenience. The Novel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen makes the point that although India never suffered a 'politically induced famine' like the Great Leap Forward in China:
'[India] had, in terms of morbidity, mortality and longevity, suffered an excess in mortality over China of close to 4 [million] a year during the same period. ... Thus in this one geographical area alone, more deaths resulted from 'this failed capitalist experiment' (more than 100 million by 1980) than can be attributed to the 'failed communist experiment' all over the world since 1917." (Black 2000)"

Blood, sweat and tear prices dropping drastically

Student loan bailout? by Alan Collinge

Of course, it'll be the lenders that get bailed out, not the debtors. Hey, someone's gotta look out for poor Albert Lord of Sallie Mae; yachts don't refuel and maintain themselves, you thoughtless bastards!

Why would student loan companies need a bailout? It's not like student loans are backed by mortgages on homes who's values go down - they're backed by the sweat, blood, and tears, of graduates without the parental assets to pay for school - so they are safe, right?

No. Because the values of graduates' blood, sweat and tears are going down. Wise financial management counsels people to spend only 10-12% of their incomes on debt repayment. In the past ten years, as income stagnated, tuition went up by nearly a third. With an economy in depression, and graduates unable to earn an income sufficient to repay record levels of debt, default rates will continue to rise. Already, for those with over $15,000 in debt - and the median debt load for graduating seniors is over $17,000 - the default rate is 1 in 5. That default rate is so bad, it makes mortgage-backed securities look like a safe investment.

The student loan and mortgage problems are fundamentally the same: metastasizing debt outstripping the ability of debtors to pay. (There's another similarity in that the prices of the underlying asset, degrees and houses, were irrationally inflated.)

So now that the bailout has passed, Sallie Mae and others are sure to stick their snouts in the trough.

Bill Clinton on marijuana, Scott McClellan on propaganda, and now another example of bad timing

Olmert Says Israel Should Pull Out of West Bank by Ethan Bronner

"We have to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, the meaning of which is that in practice we will withdraw from almost all the territories, if not all the territories. We will leave a percentage of these territories in our hands, but will have to give the Palestinians a similar percentage, because without that there will be no peace.”

Wow, who is this guy? What good ideas he has! If only he had occupied a position of power over the last few years...

Granted, by straying from the right-wing Likud party line, insufficiently demonizing the Palestinians, and suggesting that Israeli policies have ever been misguided, he is clearly an anti-Semite according to the American definition of the term.

That's what democracy looks like!?

Dysfunction in Washington Exacts a Heavy Price by Gerald F. Seib

Penetrating analysis from Gerald Seib: our the political system isn't working, essentially, because legislation that the majority of voters did not want, was not passed. Unless he is an opponent of democracy (given the economic intelligentsia's recent lurch towards socialism, perhaps that is a risky assumption?), the problem he mentions is a problem with our public square, where voters would ideally learn about and debate ideas.

Regardless of how the citizenry is laughably mis-, dis-, and uninformed, I think they would go for a bailout plan that would operate like a private equity deal. They get "preferred stock and collateral from a bank borrowing from the taxpayers, both in the full amount of the loan sought by the bank. In other words, stock plus collateral in double the amount of the loan. Taxpayers profit from a bailout before anyone else does."

There: a solution that satisfies the "no-socialism-for-the-rich" left, and the masturbating-to-the-Market right, the latter who might like the thought of acting, as a taxpayer, like a real market participant.

From bailout to buy-in

A Better Bailout Plan by David Estabrook

"Taxpayers receive preferred stock and collateral from a bank borrowing from the taxpayers, both in the full amount of the loan sought by the bank. In other words, stock plus collateral in double the amount of the loan. Taxpayers profit from a bailout before anyone else does.

Thanks to Warren Buffett and Goldman Sachs for the heads-up by disclosing the terms of their deal, which should be the low water mark for any taxpayer bailout. A higher water mark would be the terms suggested above, which are not uncommon in private equity deals and chapter 11 bailouts."

If Congress proposed a bailout like this one, I'd support it. Get some fucking equity for our $700B capital injection, and quit acting like pussies. Wait but we're Americans. "We couldn't do that because if we had - oh I mean if 'the government' had equity in these banks, that would be 'socialism'. I don't really know much about socialism except that it's a word that means "not-good", and I don't like not-good things. I can't really discuss it any further, except maybe to say that it's un-American (which is also a not-good thing)."

Welcoming economic (non-conventional) wisdom

Is Purchasing $700 billion of Toxic Assets the Best Way to Recapitalize the Financial System? by Nouriel Roubini

If in the U.S. we had a news media, rather than a strange cross between a ministry of information and a political entertainment industry, ideas such as these would be front and center amid the bailout discussions. This economist, one of the non-mainstream, heterodox, anti-neoliberal economists who predicted the housing crash and credit crisis well in advance, looks here at a recent IMF study of 42 banking crises around the world. Guess what? The results leave very little support for the current bailout proposal.

But what to expect from politicians who have been receiving advice from the very economists whose paradigm has been proven so clearly wrong over the past 30 years, culminating in a true mega-clusterfuck of falsification in the past year...?

Friedman's Disease vaccine

Video: Robert Fisk - ‘The Middle East Is Not a Complex Place’

Statistics show that people living in the U.S. have a greater risk of coming down with a case of being a total fucking idiot. Particularly when it comes to opinions about foreign countries. (Epidemiologists are studying promising linkages between television news and writers like Tom Friedman, and this epidemic of misinformed stupidity.)

In the meantime, inoculate yourself with a journalist who's lived a good part of his life in the Middle East, talking, living, eating, sharing, etc. with common people. Not exclusively foreign-educated policy professionals, economists, and CEOs, like that sack of wasted carbon, hydrogen and oxygen Friedman...

Oh, and here's a video of Tom Friedman demonstrating why the United States' plague of misinformation - and a resulting murderousness - deserves to be named after him:

We're number what, we're number what?

If donating 0.25% of one's budget to assisting the world's poor is generous, then the United States is one of the most generous countries in the world, and I am one of the most generous people in the world.

From here:
"And perhaps most disturbing, more than half of Americans today believe that the United States spends 24 per cent of its budget on aid to poor countries. In reality, the figure is actually less than one-quarter of one percent -- so the public view is off the mark by about 10,000 percent. As individuals, Americans are not stingy. They personally donated more to tsunami relief in Asia than their own government did. But they are woefully uninformed and misinformed by the media through which they perceive the world."

The US government spends 0.25% of it's budget on foreign aid. Which at any rate comprises mostly military aid and loans - which must be paid back by the poor country's people, while the money routinely goes to developed nations' corporations to build often needless infrastructure (or needed only by extractive industries that sell the country's resources at cheap prices to rich foreigners while concentrating profits in the hands of a few well-connected businessmen), with kickbacks of course going to the countries' often corrupt leaders. Meanwhile the magic of compound interest ensures that poor people the world over will for a long time be in the perverse position of paying out more money in interest and debt repayment to the governments of the world's wealthiest countries than these same countries offer in foreign aid.

"One therefore is tempted to question just what the term 'aid' has come to mean. Etymologically, aid in its modern sense means to help, assist, afford support or relief. But in feudal law it meant a customary payment made by a vassal or tenant to his lord. There is a certain irony here, because what has principally been helped by U.S. aid programs is the U.S. balance of payments, U.S. industry and commerce, and long-range U.S. strategic goals. Over time the net flow of foreign exchange is not from the United States to aid-borrowing countries as implied in the modern connotation of the term 'aid,' but from the borrowers to the United States as in the feudal connotation. So-called foreign aid is, indeed, feudatory. Aid has imposed vassalage on developing countries in the form of contractual debt services which represent mortgages on their future balance-of-payments earning power, as well as heavy opportunity costs of foregoing actions designed to guide their economies towards self-sustaining growth according to their independent desires." (From Super Imperialism by Michael Hudson)

If you want to see an arena in which the US government is (and has been, since Eisenhower warned about the military industrial complex) generous, look no further than the booming business of turning plowshares into swords:




So please do not make the mistake of attributing to the US government the quality of "generosity" in the foreign aid department, just because your information-malnourished mammalian brain can't get over the primitive desire to believe "we good, they bad." Because when it comes to aid:

WE'RE NUMBER (TWENTY) ONE! WE'RE NUMBER (TWENTY) ONE!

Net ODA in 2007 as percent of Gross National Income

Country	Aid amount by GNI
Source: OECD Development Statistics Online last accessed Sunday, April 27, 2008
Norway	0.95
Sweden	0.93
Luxembourg	0.9
Denmark	0.81
Netherlands	0.81
Ireland	0.54
Austria	0.49
Belgium	0.43
Spain	0.41
Finland	0.4
France	0.39
Germany	0.37
Switzerland	0.37
UK	0.36
Australia	0.3
Canada	0.28
New Zealand	0.27
Italy	0.19
Portugal	0.19
Japan	0.17
Greece	0.16
USA	0.16

Why they call him McNasty

(I first saw this posted on the Counterpunch website this afternoon - as of this moment it was no longer up there, so I'm posting it here.)

My Holiday with John McCain by Ana Dubey

"It was just before John McCain’s last run at the presidential nomination in 2000 that my husband and I vacationed in Turtle Island in Fiji with John McCain, Cindy, and their children, including Bridget (their adopted Bangladeshi child).

It was not our intention, but it was our misfortune to be in close quarters with John McCain for almost a week, since Turtle Island has a small number of bungalows and their focus on communal meals force all vacationers who are there at the same time to get to know each other intimately.

He arrived at our first group meal and started reading quotes from a pile of William Faulkner books with a forest of Post-Its sticking out of them. As an English Literature major myself, my first thought was “if he likes this so much, why hasn't he memorized any of this yet?” I soon realized that McCain actually thought we had come on vacation to be a volunteer audience for his “readings” which then became a regular part of each meal. Out of politeness, none of the vacationers initially protested at this intrusion into their blissful holiday, but people’s buttons definitely got pushed as the readings continued day after day.

Unfortunately this was not his only contribution to our mealtime entertainment. He waxed on during one meal about how Indo-Chine women had the best figures and that our American corn-fed women just couldn't meet up to this standard. He also made it a point that all of us should stop Cindy from having dessert as her weight was too high and made a few comments to Amy, the 25 year old wife of the honeymooning couple from Nebraska that she should eat less as she needed to lose weight.

McCain’s appreciation of the beauty of Asian women was so great that David the American economist had to move his Thai wife to the other side of the table from McCain as McCain kept aggressively flirting with and touching her.

Needless to say I was irritated at his large ego and his rude behavior towards his wife and other women, but decided he must have some redeeming qualities as he had adopted a handicapped child from Bangladesh. I asked him about this one day, and his response was shocking: “Oh, that was Cindy’s idea – I didn't have anything to do with it. She just went and adopted this thing without even asking me. You can't imagine how people stare when I wheel this ugly, black thing around in a shopping cart in Arizona . No, it wasn't my idea at all.”

I actively avoided McCain after that, but unfortunately one day he engaged me in a political discussion which soon got us on the topic of the active US bombing of Iraq at that time. I was shocked when he said, “If I was in charge, I would nuke Iraq to teach them a lesson”. Given McCain’s personal experience with the horrors of war, I had expected a more balanced point of view. I commented on the tragic consequences of the nuclear attacks on Japan during WWII –- but no, he was not to be dissuaded. He went on to say that if it was up to him he would have dropped many more nuclear bombs on Japan. I rapidly extricated myself from this conversation as I could tell that his experience being tortured as a POW didn't seem to have mellowed out his perspective, but rather had made him more aggressive and vengeful towards the world.

My final encounter with McCain was on the morning that he was leaving Turtle Island. Amy and I were happily eating pancakes when McCain arrived and told Amy that she shouldn't be having pancakes because she needed to lose weight. Amy burst into tears at this abusive comment. I felt fiercely protective of Amy and immediately turned to McCain and told him to leave her alone. He became very angry and abusive towards me, and said, “Don't you know who I am.” I looked him in the face and said, “Yes, you are the biggest asshole I have ever met” and headed back to my cabin. I am happy to say that later that day when I arrived at lunch I was given a standing ovation by all the guests for having stood up to McCain’s bullying.

Although I have shared my McCain story informally with friends, this is the first time I am making this public. I almost did so in 2000, when McCain first announced his bid for the Republican nomination, but it soon became apparent that George Bush was the shoo-in candidate and so I did not act then. However, now that there is a very real possibility that McCain could be elected as our next president, I feel it is my duty as an American citizen to share this story. I can't imagine a more scary outcome for America than that this abusive, aggressive man should lead our nation. I have observed him in intimate surroundings as he really is, not how the media portrays him to be. If his attitudes toward women and his treatment of his own family are even a small indicator of his real personality, then I shudder to think what will happen to America were he to be elected as our President."

Review: The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas

The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas by Robert McChesney

"The pipelines of thought to the minds of the nation are being contracted and squeezed. About thirty men realistically dominate the conduits of thought through the ether, the printing presses, and the silver screen. Without wide diversity of thought, freedom of speech and press become idle bits of a worn-out shibboleth. The cartelization of the mind of America is well on the way."

So wrote a one-time lawyer for the Newspaper Guild in 1945. This book is a collection of McChesney's articles published in a variety of magazines and journals over the past couple of decades.

"'If the country is governed by public opinion, and public opinion is largely governed by the newspapers,' Harvard professor Hugo Munsterberg wrote in 1911, 'is it not essential to understand who governs the newspapers?'" Indeed, and that is what this book covers. Not to ruin the suspense, but the majority of the press is owned by only a handful of corporations. Even if there were absolutely no ideological consistency among the directors of these corporations, the mere need to profitably compete with each other would create pressure to cost-cut actual news gathering, just as it has been. It is this cost-cutting that has decimated newsrooms and foreign bureaus, and it is the need for profits that keeps news tame, bland and uninformative so as not to bother the customers - the advertisers. A radio reformer in the 1930s wrote presciently that "it is unavoidable that a commercial concern catering to the public will present a service as low in standards as the public will tolerate and will produce the most profit." Wait is there a Paris Hilton TV show on tonight?

So there's no need to posit that the men who run these corporations have an understanding to produce a vilely inept media so as to make people stupid and docile. The market is capable of doing that on its own. And if you think the market fucked up mortgage and investment banking, ratings and insurance pretty royally, you can only imagine what it has done to the press.

"[In the first half of the 20th century] the power of the press was axiomatic. 'The American press has more influence than it ever had in any other time, in any other country,' Will Irwin wrote in 1911. 'No other extrajudicial form except religion, is half so powerful.' Charles Edward Russell expressed the sentiments of many, when he wrote in La Follette's in 1910, 'If the people of the entire United States could be informed every day of exactly what happens at Washington and the reason for it, the peculiar stranglehold that the corporations have upon national legislation would last no longer than the next election.'"

That sounds like a pretty good reason to keep people uninformed of exactly what happens at Washington and the reason for it. And so it has been up until today. And in these days of chaos, with markets seizing up and crashing, wars all over the place and nuclear tensions building up, it's interesting to hear something a campaigner for more public control of radio said back in 1931-2:

"As a result of radio broadcasting, there will probably develop during the twentieth century either chaos or a world-order of civilization. Whether it shall be one or the other will depend largely upon whether broadcasting be used as a tool of education or as an instrument of selfish greed. So far, our American radio interests have thrown their major influence on the side of greed. ... There has never been in the entire history of the United States an example of mismanagement and lack of vision so colossal and far-reaching in its consequences as our turning of the radio channels almost exclusively into commercial hands.... I believe we are dealing here with one of the most crucial issues that was ever presented to civilization at any time in its entire history. ... In order to get large audiences they cultivate the lower appeals ... commercialized broadcasting as it is now regulated in America may threaten the very life of civilization by subjecting the human mind to all sorts of new pressures and selfish exploitations."

Today, "[i]t would astonish almost any person to see the extent of the research deployed by marketers and advertising agencies to brand their imprint on consumers' brains. Focus groups, psychologists, and cultural anthropologists are de rigueur in marketing research. Modern marketing is clearly the greatest concerted attempt at psychological manipulation in all of human history." Imagine if the greatest concerted attempt at psychological manipulation in all of human history had an aim other than compelling targets to buy this or that brand of detergent or junk food...

Sadly, this remains in the realm of the imaginary. John Updike commented in 1984, "I have no doubt that the aesthetic marvels of our age, for intensity and lavishness of effort and subtlety of both overt and subliminal effect, are television commercials. With the fanatic care with which Irish monks once ornamented the Book of Kells, glowing images of youthful beauty and athletic prowess, of racial harmony and exalted fellowship, are herein fluidly marshaled and shuffled to persuade us that a certain beer or candy bar, or insurance company or oil-based conglomerate, is ... the gateway to the good life."

Yeah, it sounds pretty funny when put that way. Leave it to a couple of Marxists, Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran, to ruin the mood: "It is sometimes argued that advertising really does little harm because no one believes it anymore anyway. We consider this view to be erroneous. The greatest damage done by advertising is precisely that it incessantly demonstrates the prostitution of men and women who lend their intellects, their voices, their artistic skills to purposes in which they themselves do not believe, and that it teaches 'the essential meaninglessness of all creations of the mind: words, images, and ideas.' The real danger from advertising is that it helps to shatter and ultimately destroy our most precious non-material possessions: the confidence in the existence of meaningful purposes of human activity and respect for the integrity of man."

In one of the final essays in the book, McChesney couches his argument in economic terms: "Even if media markets were competitive [which they are not] and even if income distribution were more egalitarian, the market would be a significantly flawed mechanism for regulating the media system in a free and democratic society. This is not to say that there would not be a role for the commercial marketplace, merely that the commercial media should not be hegemonic. The basic problem is that markets cannot deal with all sorts of important values people may wish to see in their media, and they understand as being necessary for their media system to generate. ... [M]edia owners increasingly produce inexpensive 'news' that avoids costly in-depth and controversial public affairs issues, and concentrate upon trivial or inconsequential stories or the regurgitation of press releases and public comments by those in power. The owners make money and the consumers consume what they are given and appear satisfied, so all is well, right? Wrong. There is a massive negative externality: the dismal journalism effects all in society, including those who are not consumers of commercial journalism. It leads to an ill-informed electorate that makes poor decisions, which affects public life and the health of the economy. It makes democracy, the notion of informed self-government, less plausible."

Review: The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics

The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics by Robin Kirk

Really good collection of a variety of excerpts from some interesting books. A lot of good poetry too; like Osman Morote's "A Frightening Thirst for Violence":

"The dictator
shifts his gaze
and a rose
acclaimed as fragrant
falls, in a slice,
from just one
beheading

The dictator
swivels his hands
and
one worker
falls, the wife of a
worker
falls, the children of a
worker
fall

Oh!
what a frightening thirst
for vengeance
devours me"

Morote became the second-in-command in the Shining Path, which the book treats even-handedly, except it does tend to leave out sufficient details of the kind of daily suffering due to exploitation and inequality that led people like Morote to sacrifice his life. The book does include testimony from a government soldier, casually discussing his rapes, murders and tortures, and mentions that during the war, far more people were killed by the government than by the rebels. Some surprise.

The best instance of a description of the kind of reality people lived in - terribly far away from the wealth and comfort of rich countries - that would explain a bit about why people would give up their lives in the Shining Path or the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement to create a better society: another poem, an excerpt from "The Battle of Ayacucho" by Antonio Cisneros, which strips of glory the decisive battle that won Peru independence from Spain:

"...
From a Mother
again

My sons and the rest of the dead still
belong to the owner of the horses
and the owner of the lands, and the battles.

A few apple trees grow among their bones
and the tough gorse. That's how they fertilize
this dark tilled land,
That's how they serve the owner
of war, hunger, and the horses."

Leftist tired being right

Georgia Eager to Rebuild Its Defeated Armed Forces by C. J. Chivers and Thom Shanker

God it's getting wearisome to be Left, because it's tiring to be right... all... the... time. From Dubya being an idiot and a disaster as president, or the Iraq war being a murderously bad idea, to neoliberal, unregulated market policies being dangerously wrongheaded, it's getting old to be vindicated time and time again.

Well, seeing the New York Times finally print an accurate rendition of the Georgia-Russia conflict is hardly vindication, yet it is nice to see in the country's preeminent de facto propaganda organ, even if it comes a month late and thirty-some-odd paragraphs into a distantly-related story:

"In the field, there is evidence from an extensive set of witnesses that within 30 minutes of Mr. Saakashvili’s order, Georgia’s military began pounding civilian sections of the city of Tskhinvali, as well as a Russian peacekeeping base there, with heavy barrages of rocket and artillery fire.

The barrages all but ensured a Russian military response, several diplomats, military officers and witnesses said.

After the Russian columns arrived through the Roki Tunnel, and the battle swung quickly into Russia’s favor, Georgia said its attack had been necessary to stop a Russian attack that already had been under way.

To date, however, there has been no independent evidence, beyond Georgia’s insistence that its version is true, that Russian forces were attacking before the Georgian barrages."

Playing catch up 2, 3, 4

The global financial mess: blaming the victims by Ann Pettifor

"The stupidity, poor economic analysis and sheer ignorance of those - central bankers, politicians, auditors - that have a duty to act as guardians of the nation's and the world's finances has had and will continue to have very grave consequences for the whole of the global economy, but also for millions of individual and corporate borrowers.

Their conduct stems in part from a failure of economic analysis. More precisely, the economics profession has failed to correctly analyse and alert policy makers to the impact of the finance sector - and of privatised credit creation - on the global economy. Indeed the economics profession has had a (not accidental?) blindspot for the role of haute finance in the economy, while at the same time encouraging its deregulation.

Now, just as the curtain is being raised on the house of cards built by the finance sector, so a cabal of economists is working to pull it down.

Their main concern is - of course - to protect the sector from governmental or democratic oversight and regulation, and to transfer private losses to taxpayers. To do so, they need to distract attention from the sector, limit debate, prevent a coherent analysis of the causes of the crisis emerging, and blind citizens to the "science" of finance.

The first tactic in the campaign to divert attention is to blame the victims. The most hapless of these are sub-prime borrowers - people in low-paid work earning $7 an hour in the poorest districts of Ohio (for example) who were persuaded by dodgy mortgage-floggers that they could take on a adjustable rate mortgage at "teaser rates", go to the ball and have a roof over their heads."

The Shape of Cuba's Reforms by Saul Landau and Nelson P. Valdés

"The Party has not changed enough, however, to satisfy disaffected Cubans, those unimpressed by past accomplishments. 'What do past glories have with to do with the uncertainty of daily life?' they ask. Possessing quality education, high skill levels and good health, they feel they deserve good jobs. Indeed, their entire school experience from day care through doctorates has taught them self esteem and stimulated them to expect the best. But quality jobs are scarce on the island – and in most third world countries. Several Cubans in their 20s and 30s offered glazed looks to references of the revolution’s accomplishments and replied: 'I don’t see much future for myself here.' Yes, a qualified Engineer can feel frustrated making pizzas eight hours a day. Frustration can also lead some to become oblivious to the outside conditions that affect their lives. Cuba exists within the larger globalized corporate economy, possesses limited resources, and remains victim of a seemingly eternal US super embargo."

A Shattered Myth in Georgia by Brendan Cooney

"It's a good thing for Putin that Bush has already set the course of the 21st century. Bush's aggression offers him a ready analogy: 'Of course, Saddam Hussein ought to have been hanged for destroying several Shiite villages,' Putin said. 'And the incumbent Georgian leaders who razed ten Ossetian villages at once, who ran elderly people and children with tanks, who burned civilians alive in their sheds — these leaders must be taken under protection.'

None of Putin's charges has yet been confirmed, although scattered reports of Georgian aggression in South Ossetia have started to trickle in. If true, we'll want to know more about what prompted Saakashvili's cockamamie attack. Russian leaders have also suggested Georgia got the green light from the United States, another insinuation yet to be confirmed.

It's too early to draw conclusions, but it would be hard to believe Saakashvili got his swagger from anywhere other than his ex-best bud, Bush, who once thrilled thousands of Georgians by jigging to one of their folk songs. As good as Saakashvili's English is, it's not surprising he was unable to see through the fake Texas accent of the paper tiger.

When you believe fervently in a myth, you discard anything that contradicts it. You forget that the United States recently smashed the territorial integrity of Afghanistan and Iraq and now wants to do the same in Iran. You might remember that it attacked Iraq in 1991 ostensibly for the sake of Kuwait's territorial integrity. But you forget that it exercises this rationale only with weak countries, never with strong. It allows Chinese abuses in Tibet, and will stand idly by while Russia invades Georgia and massacres people for years in Chechnya.

A bully does not stand up to other bullies. Russia knows it can do what it wants on its block while another bully stamps its foot at the other end of the street.

...

'It was just interesting to me that here we are, trying to promote peace and harmony, and we're witnessing a conflict take place,' said Bush Monday, while he was still playing grab-ass with the athletes in Beijing. The first sitting U.S. president to attend an Olympics on foreign soil, Bush returned to the White House to deliver the following words with a straight face:

'The Russian government must respect Georgia's territorial integrity and sovereignty.'

The Georgians no longer believe. Does anyone?

Ah yes, many of us here at home still do. The Times on Sunday published an op-ed by William Kristol describing the 'aggressive powers' of the world without even a self-reflexive twitch, not even a nod at the most aggressive power of them all. It's like Parisians used to say about the ugly Eiffel Tower when it first went up—the only time you can't see it is when you're inside it."

Playing catch up 1

Georgia Gets Its War On… McCain Gets His Brain Plaque… By Mark Ames

"The invasion was backed up by a PR offensive so layered and sophisticated that I even got an hysterical call today from a hedge fund manager in New York, screaming about an 'investor call' that Georgian Prime Minister Lado Gurgenidze made this morning with some fifty leading Western investment bank managers and analysts. I’ve since seen a J.P. Morgan summary of the conference call, which pretty much reflects the talking points later picked up by the US media.

These kinds of conference calls are generally conducted by the heads of companies in order to give banking analysts guidance. But as the hedge fund manager told me today, 'The reason Lado did this is because he knew the enormous PR value that Georgia would gain by going to the money people and analysts, particularly since Georgia is clearly the aggressor this time.' As a former investment banker who worked in London and who used to head the Bank of Georgia, Gurgenidze knew what he was doing. 'Lado is a former banker himself, so he knew that by framing the conflict for the most influential bankers and analysts in New York, that these power bankers would then write up reports and go on CNBC and argue Lado Gurgenidze’s talking points. It was brilliant, and now you’re starting to see the American media shift its coverage from calling it Georgia invading Ossetian territory, to the new spin, that it’s Russian imperial aggression against tiny little Georgia.'

The really scary thing about this investor conference call is that it suggests real planning. As the hedge fund manager told me, 'These things aren’t set up on an hour’s notice.' Where this war is leading is impossible to say, but as Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention Chechnya, have shown, wars have a funny way of lasting longer, costing more in money and lives, and snuffing out whatever individual liberties the affected populations may have. As good as this war is for Saakashvili, who has become increasingly unpopular at home and abroad, or for McCain, whose poll numbers seem to rise every time the plaque devours another lobe of his brain, it also bodes well for the resurgent Prime Minister Putin, who seems to have become increasingly peeved with his hand-picked successor, President Dmitry Medvedev’s flickering independence and his liberalizer shtick. There’s nothing like a good war to snuff out an uppity sois-disant liberal who’s getting in your way–even McCain, frozen in an antiperspirant-induced fog, can still grasp this basic reptilian concept."

The FARC: fish with plenty of fresh water

The Continuity of FARC-EP Resistance in Colombia by James J. Brittain

This article puts recent media reports about the diminished strength and flagging spirits of Colombia's FARC rebels in perspective: reminding the reader first of all that many of these reports are issued by the Colombian government, and secondly that the FARC have faced far worse situations in the past. For instance, "[i]n 1973, the Colombian state, with the assistance of the United States, launched 'Operation Anori', which resulted in the destruction of much of the FARC-EP’s military supplies and sections of its leadership ... After this and other counterinsurgency campaigns took place during the early-mid 1970s, it was documented that the FARC-EP had lost seventy percent of its ammunitions with as little as one-hundred-fifty armed and trained combatants remaining." Yet the FARC re-grouped and gained strength.

In contrast to the conventional wisdom of an immanent FARC collapse, the article documents a number of impressive military actions occurring this very year. "Between the 29th of April and the 6th of May the FARC-EP carried out a coordinated series of attacks which isolated sectors of Colombia’s largest oil pipeline and subsequently halted the production of an estimated eight-hundred thousand to three-million barrels of oil. In addition, the guerrilla strategically destroyed important transportation routes needed to control the flow of oil and military supplies throughout various departments in the north of the country. Destroying an essential bridge near Catatumbo in the department of César, the FARC-EP was able to severe [sic] the movement of state and private security forces thereby keeping existing military units preoccupied (Weinberg, 2008). Following the offence, another Front in Norte de Santander pursued an aggressive attack against security forces guarding the 770 kilometre Colombian-based Ecopetrol and US-based Occidental Petroleum owned Caño-Limón pipeline near Tibu – the true target of the attack. Ironically, all this took place just a few short hours after William Brownfield, the United States’ Ambassador to Colombia, visited the area and applauded the growth in security and economic progress as a result of the FARC-EP’s so-called decline (Reuters, 2008a). In response to the FARC-EP’s strike, Colombian General Paulino Coronado coordinated a mounted offensive on 3rd of May to eliminate the FARC-EP attack and resume the flow of oil production. The guerrilla quickly eliminated the deployed battalion and continued their assault on the pipeline facilities for an additional forty-eight hours (Associated Press, 2008). Showing that their campaign targeting the Caño-Limón pipeline was not simply a one-time tactical success, the FARC-EP carried out an additional attack on Colombia’s largest coal mine – the Cerrejón – on the forty-fourth anniversary of insurgency’s inception."

The reason for the disparity between the FARC's continued military successes and the media-propagated conventional wisdom of FARC disintegration? It's structural: the Colombian state, along with its powerful U.S. ally, is dominating the public relations battle; how else do you think the ideas you have about Colombia originate? That there are lots of dispassionate reporters in Colombia monitoring the situation and sending accurate ideas about Colombian reality to the United States for dissemination? Not with the predominant trend in newspapers being widespread fat-trimming in the form of eliminating foreign bureaus. No, if the Colombian government is not populated entirely by idiots - and I don't think so, I'm a Unitedstatesian exceptionalist in this regard - then they've learned to deal with the media.

And that means basically driving to press offices, bringing food and visiting the landlord to pay the rent. Then the state PR flacks spoon-feed the one emaciated "reporter" who has to man the entire foreign bureau a salable story for the paper's consumers to consume. No, wait, wrong business model. It's to attract human eyeballs with brains attached to the paper so that they can be sold to the actual consumer, advertisers and their industrial and financial clients, to consume. In a gesture to credibility, the state PR goon perhaps flashes a government ID - aha, an official source! Then the ideas embodied in the story get shipped off to the U.S., where people infect themselves and others with them. This is how your ideas of Colombia - and so many other things - are made. Makes you wish you'd instead been on a tour of a health code nightmare sausage factory after weeks of continuous feasting on its products.

So while many of the ideas in your head that form your picture of Colombia are the product of government public relations flackery - and as such, by definition, have at best a troublesome correlation with reality - in Colombia the actual country the ever-present and, if anything, only intensifying disparity between rich and poor guarantees a solid base for FARC recruitment. As in Mao's analogy, the people are the water in which fish - the guerillas - swim. The Colombian and Unitedstatesian governments have unwittingly ensured that the rural poor are kept in a state where they will provide a solid base for the FARC for years to come.

"While it cannot be dismissed that in the past few months the FARC-EP has experienced unprecedented difficulties it must be realized that as long as inequitable sociocultural and political-economic conditions pervade Colombian society so too will a base from which the FARC-EP can recruit. The FARC-EP remain the longest running and most powerful political-military movement in contemporary Latin America with numbers still ranging in the thousands, arguably tens of thousands. Therefore, to buy into any suggestion that Colombia finds itself in a period of increased stability or that the FARC-EP have past [sic] into the annals of history is to adopt a false consciousness of the realities that exist within this Andean country....

'The internal struggle within Colombia is far from over. It will continue to be waged through radical and antagonistic forms. As the United States and the Uribe administration continue to engage a war against the poor so too will they exacerbate and intensify 'Colombia’s internal conflict by robbing families of their livelihoods and leaving them with little option but to join the left-wing guerrillas, particularly the FARC.'"

Two more from the United States' best

(click to enlarge)

Baby killer/kisser

Review: The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks

Interesting feminist perspective on how patriarchal societies are bad for men. The central argument is that patriarchy is a "dominator culture" - where all must struggle violently for power, so as to be able to dominate those weaker than oneself, and avoid the domination of those more powerful. bell hooks argues that this ethic teaches boys to strangle their emotional intelligence from a young age, to harden their hearts so as to be better able to dominate and avoid others' domination. (See martial culture, with examples like military life or gangsta rap.) Since violence is used as a tool of domination, and our species displays a fair amount of sexual dimorphism so men tend to be bigger and more muscular, women are pretty much left on the sidelines of this dominator bloodsport. The best they can do is attempt to become the wife of a strong, dominating man - and maybe exercise a little domination herself with her young sons. Or, if she's a wealthy woman, she can play the dominator game pretty much on par with men.

I have to give bell hooks respect for including class in her feminist perspective. She notes that the system we live in is patriarchal, imperialist and capitalist - and all of these elements go towards explaining why men's humanity is sacrificed: to produce the violent, emotionally crippled soldiers for a dominator society. hooks' is a holistic perspective, and she places blame where blame is due: not on individuals, but on systemic pressures on individuals, or on economic/cultural systems themselves. This is why her perspective is far deeper than the "white feminists" a friend of mine complains to me about, and hooks calls "reformist feminists":

"Reformist feminist women could not make this call [for boys and men to join feminist movement so that they would be liberated from patriarchy] because they were the group of women (mostly white women with class privilege) who had pushed the idea that all men were powerful in the first place. These were the women for whom feminist liberation was more about getting their piece of the power pie and less about freeing masses of women or less powerful men from sexist oppression. They were not mad at their powerful daddies and husbands who kept poor men exploited and oppressed; they were mad that they were not being giving [sic] equal access to power, and especially economic parity with the men of their class, they have pretty much lost interest in feminism."

The author's focus on patriarchy as the enemy reminded me of a book I read back when I was in the Marine Corps OCS (perfect instance of an institution devoted to crushing the last strands of emotional intelligence that have managed to make it past adolescence). It was called "Eve's Seed", and while I don't know anything of the critiques of the book, its theory was that prior to the advent of sedentary, agricultural societies, most human tribes lived within a matriarchal power structure. Women's work, gathering food and practicing low-intensity, small-scale agriculture, accounted for the lion's share of total economic production: and with economic power has always gone political power. It was only when males' greater muscle mass became truly powerful - in that it assisted in economic production (plow-based agriculture) to a greater degree than women's - that most humans began living in patriarchal societies. And, these being patriarchies, we all know how the switch from hunter-gatherer nomadic societies to mass sedentary agricultural societies went down: genocides. (Also, after the "civilized" peoples slaughtered off the "barbarian" tribes, the brilliant civilized people killed themselves off by dessicating their environments through agricultural overproduction and the destruction of ecological life support systems - I think this is the argument in Jared Diamond's "Collapse".)

Anyway, the only disappointing thing about the book was that hooks hasn't grappled at all - it would seem - with evolutionary psychology. What of millions of years of evolution, that in all species has created a divergence in sexual behavior and drive between the sex that spends more time caring for zygotes to the point that they can fend for themselves, and the sex that spends less time or doesn't at all? (I'd just write "male" and "female", but there are a few species where the female gives her eggs to the male, and he inseminates them and takes care of them.) Sure, it's impossible to disentangle the contribution nature and nurture make to create the fucked up men and women of patriarchal societies - but I'd be very interested to read hooks examine the contribution made by nature, not just nurture.

One last thing - hooks makes an interesting observation I had never thought of before. That as they grow up, girls learn to overvalue whatever they interpret as male love from their emotionally stunted fathers, and so in relationships end up settling for whatever attention males are able to give them. Additionally, in a dangerous dominator society, it pays for women to pick a mate who can protect them (by dominating other would-be dominators). "He wouldn't hit me if he didn't love me," etc. - explained! Also, this example shows how interconnected and self-reinforcing social systems like patriarchy are - because men also learn that women seem to like men that treat them poorly, and so tend to model themselves after misogynistic men in order, ironically, to attract women.

You ess say! You ess say!

DEVELOPMENT: U.S. Sliding By Nearly Every Measure by Alison Raphael

"A global human development index ranked the U.S. first in 1990. Today, it ranks 12th."

Oddly, I can't help but daydream about tearing out pages from this report and forcing them down Larry Kudlow's huckster throat, while in the midst of one of his booster paeans to free market capitalism being God's design for unbridled wealth creation in the greatest country on earth, the United - gag, cough, cough, gag, gag, muffled scream, wretching...

"The first-ever 'Measure of America: American Human Development Report 2008-2009,' launched Wednesday by the non-profit organisation Oxfam America, offers a statistical analysis of numerous aspects of U.S. well-being, broken down by gender, race, ethnicity, state, and even congressional district.

One surprising finding was that although the U.S. spends more per capita than any other nation in the world (5.2 million dollars daily), its citizens live shorter lives than citizens of virtually every Western European and Nordic country. And the U.S. has a higher percentage of children living in poverty than any of the world's richest countries.

...

Study author Sarah Bird-Sharps noted that: 'Some Americans are living anywhere from 30 to 50 years behind others when it comes to issues we all care about: health, education and standard of living.'

For example, residents of Connecticut, in the northeast of the country, enjoy a lifespan averaging 30 years longer than that of residents of the far-south state of Mississippi. The two states have the highest and lowest rankings, respectively, for life expectancy in the United States."

From the report itself: "The top 1 percent of households possesses a full third of America’s wealth. Households in the top 10 percent of income distribution hold more than 71 percent of the wealth, while those in the lowest 60 percent possess just 4 percent of wealth."

And as the Onion noted over a decade ago, in its article Widening Gap Between Rich And Super-Rich Threatening American Dream, "the wealthiest .01 percent of the American population holds 20 percent of the nation's wealth, or $270 trillion, an amount more than two times the holdings of the next richest .09 percent combined.

The current disparity is an alarming indicator of things to come, according to Martin Hubbell, professor of macroeconomics at Yale University. 'A healthy capitalist economy should not concentrate so much of its wealth in the hands of so few,' Hubbell said. 'I mean, it should concentrate it in the hands of a few, but not so few.'"

Tom Friedman's heir apparent

Obama Needs a Better Reading List by Thomas Frank

Thomas Frank is writing for the Wall Street Journal now! This fulfills the prophesy I remember reading months ago (I think by Noam Chomsky) that if Murdoch bought the Journal, he might actually tone down the right-wing nuttery of its comics-I-mean-editorial page.

This piece is on Fareed Zakaria, about whom I know little, except that to be an editor at Newspeak-I-mean-Newsweek you must be, to a large extent, a geyser spewing the conventional wisdom. Seems like he's a young, hip Tom Friedman. Tom gets baby boomers to nod their heads to a stream of know-nothing drivel about flat earths, or laughably inappropriate anecdotes about how the successes of the Japanese protectionist state proves the wisdom of the exact opposite economic policies. Fareed's more for the younger crowd, but he's the same kind of self-deluded, economics-misinformed huckster for the masses.

For example: "One more reason to be leery of all this market idolatry: It's wrong. Take the aspect of the 'new era' that Mr. Zakaria most admires – 'the free movement of capital,' the international loans and investments he worships as 'globalization's celestial mechanism for discipline.' In point of fact, the rise of China and India – Mr. Zakaria's own paradigm cases – was possible only because those countries shunned global commercial credit markets in the 1970s, allowing them to avoid the interest-rate shock of the early '80s."